visit a ghost town

last summer i drove out west, with my 2 younger brothers. big mistake. we past a ghost town, but didn’t turn off. i didn’t even mention i wanted to go. we had been bickering for days, and were set on making it to SF in a day, so i just thought it better not to say anything.

don’t know when i will be near one again. i guess there are some in the UP, but that’s a bit of a trip as well. so, i give up.

I hadn’t intended to complete this goal today. We’d planned to take advantage of the beautiful spring weather and spend the day at the Valley of Fire. That was before we remembered that there was a Nascar race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway and that I-15 would be a virtual parking lot. So we opted to go the opposite direction and visit the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada. (It was on the list of places I want to visit here before we move.)

Rhyolite is a former mining town on the edge of Death Valley about 3 or so miles outside Beatty, NV.

This is a picture of the old Cook bank. It’s apparently one of the most photographed ruins in Nevada.

This is the Bottle House. One enterprising member of the former town was very creative with his building materials. He used leftover bottles from the local saloon! (I believe the house was restored in the 1990’s.)

Because Rhyolite was a mining town, many shafts still dot the hillsides. I took this picture through a barbed wire fence that was set up to deter overzealous explorers.

This building was right across the street from the bank.

By far, the most desolate place we visited was the cemetery. Talk about lonely! Because most of the markers are missing (if there were ever any there) the majority of the people interred there are now nameless.

If you want to learn more about Rhyolite, this site is an excellent place to visit.

T-rex seems to think this is a good idea too!

I did not hear anything…. and we were suppossed to. not worth it!

i love ghost towns, but they make me feel so sad… it’s so hard to imagine them bustling and full of life. i wish i could go back in time and witness them in their heydays

This has been on my list for a while, when I realized that I’ve already done this, years ago. I went here with my family on vacation… touristy, but still a lot of fun! I’d like to visit more ghost towns, maybe some here in California.

it was cool, i liked it :)

Bannack, Montana, a well preserved ghost town that is now a State Park.

Pennsylvania
Byrnesville, Pennsylvania
Centralia
Frick’s Lock, Pennsylvania
Ingleby
Livermore
Pithole, Pennsylvania
Scotia, Pennsylvania
Wehrum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_United_States#Pennsylvania

I’ve made somewhat of a start on this… I googled “Southern California ghost towns” and narrowed it down to a few that really like they’d be neat to visit… Calico, which is an authentic ghost town which was turned into a sort of amusement park in the earlier part of the 1900’s but which still has quite a bit of the original town, cemetery, etc. Some fake gunfights and stuff like that that sound a lil bit hokey and tourist-trappish, but sounds like it’d be a fun little day trip.
Two other places are almost next to each other (at least on the map), Randsburg and Garlock. Both used to be mining communities… The main feature of Garlock, I believe, is a tunnel that goes all the way through a mountain. Apparently this guy was mining, and going deeper and deeper, and before he knew it he’d popped clear out of the other side of the mountain. Nearby is Randsburg, which is a “living ghost town”, meaning a few people still live there. A lot of buildings still standing, a couple working saloons among other things.
I decided on these three because most of the other ghost towns were either too far, or on private property, or else were nothing more than one or two foundations.