On a sunny November morning, we drove south from Reno on Highway 395 to Bridgeport, then turned east on California state road 270. The purpose was a photo-shoot on Bodie’s brief and colorful history. To call 270 a road is an exaggeration; it appears whatever old road existed has been ripped up to build a nice new road; unfortunately construction seems to have stopped at the ripping up stage. The first 10 miles are “paved”, then the blacktop abruptly ends, which gives you some idea of why the town remained untouched for so many years. The last stretch is a bone rattling, up and down, in and out of ruts drive, at an average speed of 15 mph.
Bodie’s website says: At 8,375 feet elevation (2560m) visitation is comfortable from about May to October. In winter the road is impassable and snowshoes are the only way to the ghost town. Well, we missed the comfy-zone by 7 weeks, but once I stepped out of the car, I heard the stories of the men, the women and the children who abandoned their homes and gave up their claims so fast that they seem to have vanished mid-stride and mid-sentence.Dusty whiskey bottles line warped shelves. Framed black-and-white photos, veiled in spider webs, hang on crooked nails. Dog-eared hymnbooks rest in church pews. Creaky shacks with tools and equipment are seriously spooky and the ground is littered with old debris, ranging from broken bottles and rusty cans, to cars and huge mining equipment. Old power poles and insulators are everywhere. That’s because Bodie was one of the first fully electrified towns in the world. Yes in the WORLD!
The settlement was established in 1861, two years after Waterman S. Bodie unearthed traces of gold in the nearby hills. For the next few years only around 20 people lived in Bodie. When a major Iron-Ore mine was discovered in 1875, hordes of miners, tradesmen, businessmen, robbers, gunfighters, wives and prostitutes - some desperate, all hopeful - flooded to this lawless camp and by the end of the year, Bodie had a population of about 10,000 - as well as 65 saloons, three newspapers, a plethora of brothels, and, to quote the Ranger, a reputation as "a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion." Some estimate a killing happened every day.Little evidence of lust or passion can be found in the 170 abandoned wooden buildings scattered over these windswept and barren hills, the rest having succumbed to fires or the harsh climate.
Maneuvering the dirt road back to civilization, I had a feeling of real remoteness, mixed with sadness for the people who never found their Mother Lode in this wicked and wild town named Bodie.
Sad! Another remnant of the Wild West is gone! But the legend still whispers to anyone willing to walk through and listen.
