Nevada Road Trip: Excursions from Beatty (Day 2)

I started the morning with a pancake from Mel’s Diner. The only other customers were five locals in their jeans and hats spending the morning solving the problems of the world.

Rhyolite is a ghost town just a few miles from Beatty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada). The town began its life in 1905, and, by 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, three railroads, and a stock exchange. Its peak population ranged between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.

The town died almost as quickly as it had arisen. By 1910 the boom was over, and businesses began to close. In 1916, the power company turned off the electricity and even removed the poles. There is very little left of the town as most of the buildings were moved elsewhere or the materials were repurposed.

As I was taking pictures of one of the buildings, I heard this buzzing noise: not like a snake, more like a hive of angry hornets. Just as I was beginning to worry, I realized that of the two other people who were there, one of them was flying a drone. I walked down to meet him and found that he and his wife were from Australia, on a four-week visit to the West Coast. They were on their way to Yosemite. I thought Rhyolite was a rather esoteric choice of stops, but apparently they were fascinated by ghost towns.

One building in town that is still fairly well preserved is Tom Kelly’s Bottle House:

Though the lights went out in 1914, they turned back on a decade later when Paramount Pictures used Rhyolite as a setting for the 1926 film The Air Mail. Some of Rhyolite’s remaining structures were restored for their film debut, including the Tom Kelly bottle house. This residence—built completely out of 50,000 medicine, whiskey, and beer bottles—demonstrates that glass in the American West was sometimes a cheaper construction material than wood or stone. The house still stands today and is the oldest and largest known bottle house in the United States. https://travelnevada.com/ghost-town/rhyolite-ghost-town/

Right next door to Rhyolite is the Goldwell Open Air Museum. This outdoor sculpture park “was created in 1984 by a group of well-known Belgian artists (led by the late Albert Szukalski) who were drawn to the remote upper portion of the vast Mojave Desert to pursue artistic vision free from convention. Each piece was designed within the context of the landscape and should be interpreted as such.” (https://travelnevada.com/museums/goldwell-open-air-museum/) Since then, more sculptures have been added.

The first sculpture was a ghostly life-size version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper:

Later sculptures included a 25-foot woman constructed from pink cinder blocks and a 24-foot steel prospector and his penguin companion:

Beatty is famous for the number of wild burros that are in the area and that wander through town. I didn’t see any while in town (although they left plenty of evidence of their presence), but a few did show up as I was leaving Rhyolite: