Rhyolite Ghost Town

Outside the eastern boundary of Death Valley and nine miles west of Beatty, Nevada sits a ghost town that has appeared in eight movies, two newsreels, three travelogues, one music video and one documentary. Pick up any Nevada oriented magazine and you’ll more than likely find pictures of the “skeletons” of what was once a thriving mining town.  Rhyolite is probably the best known and most photographed ghost town in Nevada.  But even so, it’s a place about which only a few people outside of Nevada know.   

    Because it’s tucked back in between mountains, it’s not visible from the highway.  If you’ve driven from Death Valley to Beatty, or the other way round and you are a heavy-footed driver, you’ve probably whizzed on by and never knew that you missed a wonderful ghost town.

    The first time I visited Rhyolite it was while on a vacation trip in 1990.  We were camped out in Death Valley and the friends we were traveling with suggested we go see the old ghost town.  Since that time, I’ve gone back for an encore several times.  Its history is typical of many boomtowns...rags to riches to rags.  The rise to glory was quick and the descent into the history books even quicker, but it didn’t go down without a fight.

    The year was 1904 when two men, Shorty Harris and Eddie Cross discovered gold in the area.  Their Bullfrog Mine and Charles M. Schwab’s Montgomery Shoshone Mine brought several thousand people into what was first a gathering of tents and makeshift huts. The site spread itself out along an alluvial plain between two mountain ranges, not far from the original gold strike.  It wasn’t long before a thriving town emerged, gaining its name from the rocks that contained the gold.  At its height an estimated 10,000 people lived within the town limits.  It was heralded as “the town that would last.”  By 1907, it had electricity and the future looked rosy and then along came the financial crisis known as the “Panic of 1907” and as quickly as it rose, Rhyolite began to fall.

    The diehards refused to give up, hoping for a new boom, but unfortunately it never happened and the downward slide continued.  The population eventually shrunk to under 700.   In 1916 the power was turned off.  Three years later the post office closed and most of the folks left, leaving only a few holdouts, but even they finally gave up.  In 1924 Rhyolite, the town built to last, was left alone to wither in the hot desert sun and with the help of vandals it eroded to it present state, a mixture of “skeletons,” a fenced off depot and shacks loosing their battle with gravity.

    Even though Rhyolite lost its battle, modern technology helped to keep the search for gold alive.  From 1991 until 2001 the (new) Bullfrog Mine was in full operation, extracting gold that the previous miners had missed, most of it microscopic and located in the tailings.  There was enough gold left behind to produce over 2,000,000 ounces.  Even that petered out and the last time I was there the Bullfrog had closed and the building were torn down and carted away.

    Driving into Rhyolite it would be almost impossible to miss a rather bizarre display of statuary.  Belgian artist Albert Szukalski along with a business partner owned a small piece of property on the outskirts of the ghost town.  In 1984 he opened what he called the Gold Well Open Air Museum on his land.  Then he and a small band of artists created weird and wonderful sculptures.  There’s a version of  “the Last Supper,” a “Ghost Rider” preparing to ride his bicycle, a miner and his penguin, a mosaic couch and several others.  Some have called the work offensive and others have laughed at such an unkind criticism.  As for me, I am not offended and they do make me smile.  But most of all they’re fun to photograph.

    Finally, you can’t write about Rhyolite without mentioning the bottle house.  I’m not going to say much about it here.  Go to Google and type in "bottle house rhyolite" and see for yourself.  The first hit has a lot a information and the second one is fun to watch.

Q