Bodie

Bodie sits in a bare, wind-scoured basin at about 8,379 feet in California's Mono County, and the first thing that strikes you is how complete it still looks. Roughly 110 wooden buildings stand along the dusty grid of streets, their paint long gone to silver, many of their interiors still holding what was left behind. The state keeps the town in what it calls "arrested decay": nothing is restored to look new, nothing is allowed to fall down. The effect is less a museum than a town that stopped mid-sentence.

The story begins with a prospector, W. S. Bodey, who found gold here in 1859 and died in a blizzard that November without seeing what followed. The real rush came in 1876, when the Standard Company struck rich ore, and within three years Bodie had grown to somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 people and about 2,000 structures. Main Street alone counted dozens of saloons; there was a Chinatown with a Taoist temple and a red-light district whose best-remembered figure, Rosa May, is said in local tradition to have nursed miners through an epidemic. The boom was brief. By 1890 fewer than 800 people remained, a visitor in 1915 already called the place a ghost town, and the last mine shut in 1942.

What to look for: the white Methodist Church of 1882, the great bulk of the Standard stamp mill on the hillside, the Miners Union Hall that now holds the museum, and the cemetery on the edge of town with its Miners Union section and a memorial to President James Garfield. Bodie also has a quiet place in engineering history, since a hydroelectric plant built in 1892 sent power to the mines over an unusually long transmission line. The climate explains the town's lonely beauty: winters are long, snow is heavy and the wind can be ferocious, which is why the light on weathered boards and sagebrush hills in summer feels so hard-won. Bodie became a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and a state historic park in 1962.

Getting there

Bodie lies about 12 miles (20 km) east-southeast of the small town of Bridgeport; the nearest larger town listed for the area is South Lake Tahoe, about 116 km away. The closest airport is Mammoth Yosemite Airport (MMH), roughly 67 km to the south. By car, leave US 395 about seven miles south of Bridgeport and follow State Route 270 east for ten miles to the end of the pavement, then three miles of graded dirt road; the drive from the highway takes around 45 minutes. In winter the road is often impassable to ordinary cars because of snow.