Up at 7.15am. Ate the breakfast we bought in the garage last night and were packed and out by 8.30am. Forgot to mention in yesterday's blog that when we bought the breakfast stuff last night, the cashier in the garage was talking to another guy who was in there and managed to scan all our items and take payment without breaking eye contact with the guy he was talking to. It was like we weren't even there.
Drove the short distance to Bodie SHP . The last six miles was on a gravel track. Arrived just as the park was opening. There was one car ahead of us and no one behind. Parked up and took the self guided tour pamphlet and set about seeing this true wild west ghost town.
A guy called WS Bodey discovered gold here in 1859. At that point people flocked there. The town was named after him, although with the spelling of Bodie. He died in a blizzard the same year so never got to see the town grow. By the 1870s the mining industry was in decline and people had started leaving but then a mine collapse revealed a big seam of gold ore. Word spread and the boom time began. At its peak it is thought it housed about eight thousand people. It became famous for bad men and wild times. When the boom was over people started leaving and in the early 1900s the population had dwindled. Mining finished in 1942. The last people to live there did so in the mid fifties. Since then it has just been left. At one and a half miles above sea level it has harsh winters so when the gold was gone the people didn't stay. The State Park Service bought it in 1962 and have preserved it in a state of arrested decay. This means nothing is restored, things are just stabilised if needed.
Visitors have free reign to wander around the town. Some buildings are open for you to go in, but the majority you can just view from the outside, looking through windows. Only 5% of buildings remain which gives some indication of just how big it would have been in its heyday.
Here are some pictures. I don't really need to describe how amazing it is.
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| Door to a jail cell |
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| Jail |
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| Strong room of the bank - the bank has gone |
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| Bodie from above |
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| School room |
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| School room and globe |
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| Small bedroom |
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| Store front |
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| Bar with billiard table |
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| The Standard Mill |
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| Fire engine |
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| Bar with roulette tables and gambling chips |
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| Store front |
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| Shelves of goods |
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| Store |
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| Freight wagons |
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| Hotel/Post Office and fraternal hall |
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| Morgue with coffins |
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| Large house |
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| Parlour |
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| Fireplace |
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| Another small bedroom |
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| A tiny double bed |
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| Church |
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| Inside Church |
We spent three hours there in total. It was fascinating, very unlike going to a National Trust place which may well be a lot older but where things are repaired and staged. This is just as it was the day people left. The dust sitting on things, the decaying ceilings, etc, add to the eeriness. You could spend a lot longer going to see all the other bits and bobs, for instance we didn't get to the cemetery. We did however get a choice between lot of nice magnets and Ann got a Bodie 2024 calendar. There were lots of Belding Ground Squirrels all over the place running about too.
It made me think of the halcyon days of the Ermington Players building the set for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Sisters.
We left and drove a couple of hours south to Bishop where we stopped for lunch in Subway. Then we headed another hour south to our destination for the next two nights, Best Western Frontier Motel in Lone Pine. Checked in. Sat down for a while cooling off.
Went out for dinner at The Grill. It was a nice little place. We then went and filled the car up with fuel and got a few supplies in for tomorrow's day out. We don't want to be unprepared for it. Drove back to the motel and topped up the windscreen washer fluid as well. Now getting an early night as we are setting the alarm for 3am!
States visited - 4
Belding Ground Squirrel watch - high
