Ghost Towns & Cemeteries - Bodie, CA

Seems like the car (whichever car Pat and I happen to find ourselves driving) automatically turns off at ghost towns. The first one was Virginia City. It did the same thing at Bodie. I'd intended to turn left at the Virginia Lakes road, at Conway Summit on Highway 395. Next thing I knew, I'd sailed right past it with no convenient way to make a U-turn. Pat and I made a quick decision to take the car's suggestion and explore Bodie.

The road out to Bodie is 12 miles of pavement followed by 3 miles of washboard gravel. Wouldn't you know it? I'd run the car through my favorite Fresno car wash just the day before. The heretofore silver Saturn took on a patina of dirt. Fitting, I think, for a town who'd seen its glory days nearly a century before.

Bodie, too, had its share of electrical poles and wires, but they didn't intrude on the senses as they did in Virginia City, especially when I read that electricity to a certain extent did exist during Bodie's heydey. The whole town had an old west aura that seemed so much more appropriate than Virginia City.

The town's skyline was dominated by the old wooden church on Main Street as well as the mine complex on the hill. Down the street a block or so sat an old-fashioned schoolhouse.


Despite the rundown condition of all the buildings (maintained but not restored according to the California state park system), it's not difficult to visualize Bodie as a bustling mining town with some 60 saloons at its peak.

A number of residences had survived the brutal Sierra Nevada winters, although they appeared dilapidated and worse-for-wear but amazingly stylish with large mullioned windows and high-peaked roofs.







Above:  A Bodie residence in disrepair

 

Above:  The mining complex 

The cemetery on the hill outside the town boundary is quite a bit smaller than one would expect given the violence that was known to take place under the influence of gold and alcohol. According to the California State Park system there was sometimes a killing a day in Bodie.    

 

Above:  Children's graves in Bodie were marked with a lamb atop the stone monument.