Bodie CA

Picture cowboy movies and the old Wild West, and you’re picturing Bodie in its heyday. A gold mining boom town. Today it’s a ghost town, preserved in a state of ‘arrested decay’. Walk the streets, peak in the windows, see life as it was left when the town declined and the people walked away. Situated high in the Sierra Nevada mountain range at an altitude of 8375 feet, mixing desert and snow, an isolated town, down a rough dirt road. You can only imagine the lifestyles and the hardships of those who lived here over a century ago.

Looking through dry desert grasses to the dramatic snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains, a high desert landscape under a blue sky.

A distance sign on the rough road into this ghost mining town, snowy and a long way from anywhere; A pale old weatherboard houses with a yellow door, blending in with the bleached high desert landscape of dry grassy hills and snow.

Looking across dry vegetation and snow to the old wooden buildings of the small mining ghost town at the foot of a hill; An old power pole made from  a twisted tree in the empty main street of the ghost town.

The weathered yellow front door of an even more weathered pale wooden cottage.

A small wooden hut in the snowy high desert landscape of snow and dry grassy hills; One of the rough hewn wooden buildings with a rusted corrugated iron roof, still intact though the town was mostly abandoned in the early 20th Century.

Despite the warm mid-spring day and clear blue skies, large piles of snow still cover the buildings and ground, like this rambling house made from wood and corrugated iron, highlighting the hardships of the mining-era settlers; The interior of an abandoned house in a state of ‘arrested decay’, exactly as it was left all those years ago, stained walls and rotten furniture.

Warped boards and wavy old glass, the two most substantial shop buildings still standing in the main street, one made of brick and the other of wood.

Old bricks and worn stairs.

An old wooden cart sits in the snow as it has done for decades; An old Wild West-style wooden shopfront, left to ruins in the melting snow.

An old shack on the snowy desert plain, reflected in the window of the old pub, the only brick building in town.

An old weatherboard cottage with a domesticating fence around it on the edge of town, looking out towards endless pale grassy hills and snow.

To see more photos of the high desert landscape of the Sierra Nevada mountains go to Virginia City NV & Walker River CA.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 9th, 2010 at 9:27 am. It is filed under inland and tagged with America, Bodie, California, desert, heritage, mountains, Sierra Nevada, snow, spring, town. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.