Bars in Jerome

Spirit Room, 166 Main Street, is below the Connor Hotel and is the one most people have heard of, with live music on its own schedule. Paul and Jerry’s Saloon is the other, along the same street.

Jerome has about four hundred and fifty residents and sits on a 30-degree hillside at 5,200 feet, a mile above the valley floor. Two bars on Main Street is not a thin offering here; it is the town center.

The drive is the thing to plan

This is the part to take seriously. Jerome is reached by SR-89A switchbacks, a series of tight hairpins with a long drop on the outer edge and no lighting. It is a beautiful road in daylight and an unforgiving one after a few drinks, in rain, or in the dark, and it is the same road whichever direction you leave in.

There is no bus up here and rideshare coverage is thin. If the evening is going to involve more than one drink, the answer is a designated driver decided before you set off, or staying in Jerome, which has rooms but not many.

Parking before the drinking

Jerome charges $5 for the day in its paid lots, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., paid by card at a kiosk. The free option is the 300 Level lot on Perkinsville Road, with a free shuttle into town on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays. Park once. The streets are steep, narrow and stacked on top of each other, and circling for a space is not a thing anybody does here twice.

Making an evening of it

Jerome is fifteen minutes above Clarkdale and about twenty-five above Cottonwood. If you want a longer evening with more choice, Old Town Cottonwood has a walkable strip of bars, breweries and tasting rooms in half a mile, on the flat, with free parking; the Old Town guide covers it.

What Jerome has that Cottonwood does not is the view, which on a clear evening runs the whole length of the valley to the Mogollon Rim.