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.

Ghost Towns & Cemetaries - Virginia City, NV

Seems like the journeys Pat and I have taken recently have taken on a certain . . . flavor . . . OLD. As in ghost towns and cemetaries.

We've promised ourselves that each time we venture out we'll hit someplace neither of us has been before. In early August our Tahoe trip included a visit to Virginia City, an old mining town perched at the 6,200 foot elevation on the side of a Nevada mountainside. Some will remember it as the fictionalized setting for the 70's TV series, "Bonanza."

To get there, we took the long way around from Carson City, via highway. As we wound through the mountains, incredible views emerged of Reno, in the distance. Amazingly a number of higher-end houses were tucked strategically along the highway, taking advantage of those vistas.

Virginia City, to me, at least, was at once fascinating and disappointing.

Fascinating . . . as we imagined the wild-and-wooley life of miners searching for elusive wealth. The evidence of a once booming town was obvious as we checked out the saloons that lined the main street along with the offices of the Territorial Enterprise, where Mark Twain began his journalism career. Juxtaposed against the saloons were St Mary's in the Mountains Catholic Church, which dominates the Virginia City skyline, and St Paul's Episcopal Church. Both of them are still active, although St Mary's is in the midst of an extensive renovation, so St Paul's currently serves as its subsitute.

Disappointing . . . because spider webs of wires strung along telephone poles mar the views of Main Street, along with the cars parked along its length. The mood built up by the wonderfully decrepit buildings is destroyed by the modern conveniences the autos and wires represent.

Piper's Opera House was a pleasant find, and I couldn't wait to let friend JK know I'd discovered it. What a marvelous bit of synchronicity when he told me that as a teenager he'd visited Virginia City a number of times with his mother. The Opera House was a highlight of his time there. He wonders if that might have been the start of his love affair with the world of opera.


We wandered up and down the street, into and out of the many saloons, enjoying a Sarsaparilla in one of them.


Ironically the part of Virginia City I enjoyed the most was the Silver Terrace cemetery. Unkempt, rocky and stark, the land this last resting place occupies must not allow for a a restful sleep as the wind howls incessantly among the headstones. Most of the graves date from the 1800's, with a few of them drifting into the 20th century.