Nevada Mining Towns

On my last full day in Las Vegas I packed up the car with my friend and her kids and we headed into the high desert to visit three mining towns. Two are still in existence, as towns anyway, if not as mines, while one is just a ghost of itself.

Tonopah is about a three-hour drive north. The road cuts through mile after mile of dusty desert and brown mountains, with the occasional small town in between. There's a prison at Indian Springs, and a few brothels (the Shady Lady Ranch looked particularly forlorn).

In Tonopah, at 6,000 feet elevation, the breeze is cool; thirty degrees cooler than the scorching valley below. We took a guided tour of the Tonopah Mining Park, a park devoted to the silver mine that started operation in 1960. It was pretty fascinating to see how it all worked, with deep veins in the Earth going 500 feet down, and 500 miles of inter-connected tunnels. The mine stopped operation about 50 years, but several billion dollars of silver out of the ground.

After a picnic lunch we headed to Goldfield, which, as the name suggest, was a gold mining town. Now it's a charming little town with antique stores, with a large empty hotel at the center, The Goldfield Hotel. It is said to be haunted.

Our last stop, and a place I've been wanting to go to for years, is Rhyolite. It sprung up around the Bullfrog mine, which started in 1905. Almost as quickly it went bust, and by 1920 was a tourist attraction and a movie set. Most of the buildings are in ruins, but there are two oddities that make the town one of the most visited ghost towns in the West (when we were there, unbelievably there were two other families also visiting). One is the Goldwell Museum, an open-air collection of statues. The most distinctive is a row of ghostly figures that have to seen to be appreciated.

The second is the Tom Kelly Bottle House, pictured above. Mr. Kelly started building the house in 1905, but never lived in it. He was 76 when he built it, using 30,000 bottles (mostly from Busch beer, with a few patent-medicine bottles). It was been renovated over the years, but seems in pretty good shape and kind of cozy. Today it's one of the great American roadhouse attractions.

There's something about being in the desert, the middle of nowhere, that's very appealing. Of course modern conveniences have crept in, but when you're standing in a place like Rhyolite, you can seem like you're a million miles removed from everything you've known before.