On to Bodie SP…

After the visit at Mono Lake we headed north to a fairly well known State Historical Park at Bodie. It’s fairly popular with Californians but not many people outside of California have heard of it.  It has been a historical park since 1962 and though only 5% of the buildings remain since it’s heyday in the 1880’s, it is truly a ‘ghost town’ of the old west. It’s being maintained in a state of ‘arrested decay’ by the park service. Mining was what made it a bustling, bawdy, dangerous town of 10,000 at it’s peak. Back in the day, murders occurred with monotonous regularity.

After driving a typical modern freeway for a hour and a half, we turned off onto a windy, narrow road leading back up into the hills. Then the road turned to gravel and dirt. The weather up here is unpredictable much of the year, but when we arrived, Dec. 10th, 2011, it was fine, if a little coolish. The sun was uncluttered with clouds and though you needed a jacket, overall it was fine.

We drove right through the parking lot at first trying to find a place to park the RV, and following the ‘RV Parking’ signs. But those signs just lead us down to a dumpy area with snow on the side of the road. Thinking that must be wrong, we found a place to turn around and headed back up to the nearly empty parking lot, and parked across 3-4 regular spaces out of the way. Of course the Park Ranger wandered over and told us that, yep, we were suppose to park down the hill…along side of the road. Oh, well, could have been worse I suppose.

As one old sourdough quipped near the end of life of the town:

And now my comrades all are gone;

Naught remains to toast.

They have left me here in my misery,

Like some poor wandering ghost.

Although only 5% of the town is still standing, there’s still a number of structures, most of the original buildings were taken by fire. Notice the snow…if we’d come a month later, it would be covered. This place still has a ‘wicked climate’, the temperature up here can plunge to -40°F in the winter. And though the day we visited was pleasant, usually there are unholy winds with which to contend. Bodie is located to the east of Yosemite National Park, due north of Mono Lake, and northwest of Death Valley.

Gold was discovered here in 1859, by Waterman S. Body, and I believe they pulled $100 million out of the mines here. The place was known as “a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion” to Rev. F. M. Warrinton in 1881 and one little girl, whose family was taking her there, uttered a famous line, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie”. One famous resident, probably a composite, nicknamed the ‘Badman from Bodie’, was only one of many bad guys here. Stage coach robbers, bank robbers, petty thieves, hustlers, gun fighters, the whole gambit made there home here.

The town had 65 saloons that provided relaxation after a hard days work in the mines, as did the numerous prostitutes in town, so I guess a church was needed. Someplace to escape the bad men, bad whiskey, and bad climate, at least for an hour or two a week.

What’s interesting to me is that this town was one of the first in the west to generate their own electricity. They also had public wells, city water, sewer.

What’s interesting about this ghost town, as opposed to the others I’ve visited, is that nearly all the furniture is still here. Most people just abandoned everything as they moved away when the time came as it was to difficult and expensive to ship it anywhere.

JS Cain became a principle land owner in Bodie. This was one of the fanciest homes here. That’s still standing, anyway.

Then I left the town proper and hiked up to the graveyard. Called the Wards Area Cemetery.

As you can see from this headstone, people lived here in Bodie pasted the ’60’s. Some who had moved away still wanted to be buried here.

After a couple hours roaming around Bodie, we headed back south. This view of Mono Lake is from a hill that the early miners had to struggle over with their supplies. But we can’t leave Bodie without a mention of ‘The Curse of Bodie‘. No, I didn’t steal any artifacts as there weren’t any just lying around to pilfer.

After this pause, we just headed on home, stopping in Lone Pine at the Boulder Creek RV Resort for the night. Nice place. I picked up a book on Mark Twain as he was in this area back before he became famous and I’ve always loved his works. He never made it to Bodie, but he prospected nearby. There’s a road that was in rough shape from Bodie that goes to the town he was gold mining, Aurora, Nevada, though some historians say he did actually visit Bodie once.

Next morning I took some shots of the RV park we were in. This area was once a bustling shipping point for the numerous mines in the area.

So, that’s the end of our trip. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.