Bodie

Last week I visited Bodie for the first time. It's a ghost town that is now a state park. Bodie was founded in 1859, and a few people lived here as late as the early 1940s. The town's heyday was around 1880, when 10 thousand people lived here and gold mining was at its peak. Fires in 1892 and 1932 burned many buildings, but there are still about a hundred structures preserved in a state of "arrested decay"...the condition in which they existed when the park was founded in 1972. Here's one of the main drags.

Life was harsh here. The town is 8300 feet above sea level, and the weather's cold most of the year. Last winter the temperature bottomed out at 28 below zero F, which is apparently a rather mild extreme. There was virtually no indoor plumbing in the town. It would not be pleasant to use the outhouse when it's 20 below or so.

Since the town had a few inhabitants well into the 20th century, some semi-modern trappings exist. Here's the gas station on the main drag.

The vehicle in the previous pic is authentic but obviously restored and maintained. The cars that have been parked in Bodie for over half a century are in a somewhat different state of repair.

This is a classroom in the school. As a history buff I found this pic interesting; blow it up and you'll see that the map of Europe has the national boundaries of the period between the world wars...1918-1939. The school, church, and several other buildings were not finally abandoned until the 1930s, though the town's prime years were a half century earlier. The stamp mill used in gold mining operations was closed in 1938.