Rhyolite (ghost town), Nevada
TRAVEL ROUTE: Las Vegas - US 95 - Beatty - NV 374 - Rhyolite
September 24, 2006 — It was with no regret that we left Las Vegas early in the morning. It wasn't that our schedule was particularly tight, but this had been our first brush with civilization a major population center in four days and the culture shock of this particular one was too much to take and we wanted to get back into the boonies as soon as we could.
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From Las Vegas, there are several ways of getting to Death Valley, our next stop, and we chose to enter by way of Daylight Pass on the northeast side of the park. We covered the 100 or so miles from Las Vegas to Beatty, Nevada in about an hour and a half on US 95. The road is flat, straight and wide with almost no traffic. What traffic there was was going the other direction, so we had little to slow us down along the way (if you're calculating, that works out to about 66 miles per hour - the question you would naturally ask is, "why go so slow if the road is good and there is no traffic?" Answer, we made a 10 minute gas and bathroom stop along the way. That raises the average speed to 75 mph and part of that time was getting out of Las Vegas, so we were actually motoring along pretty quickly). The morning was clear and quite mild (low-80s at 8 am). In fact, the area was said to be experiencing a "cold wave." We wondered if that applied to Death Valley, as well.
The town of Beatty is a former supply hub of the Bullfrog Mining District. Even though the local mines have long since petered out, Beatty has managed to re-invent itself and hold on to life as a desert adventure center, capitalizing on its proximity to Death Valley (7 miles) and Rhyolite Ghost Town (4+ miles). From Beatty, we took NV 374 west for about 4 miles to the Rhyolite turnoff and went another mile on a good quality gravel road to the town.
In the first decade and a half of the 20th century, after some gold had been discovered in the local rocks (called Rhyolite), the eponymous town grew quickly from a small mining camp to a booming city of 10,000 people, served by schools, churches, 3 railroad lines, an opera house, a stock exchange, plumbing, telephone, electricity - and a red-light district. In a sense, Rhyolite was the last gasp of the gold rush - the city was built on high hopes but only one established mine, the Montgomery Shoshone, which never really lived up to its potential, and was closed in 1911, taking with it the hopes of the 10,000.
The little bit that's left of the original town sits in lonely isolation at the base of the pyramid-shaped Bullfrog Mountains and surrounded by the hot, dry Amargosa Desert. The first thing you see when approaching the town is, very possibly, the last thing you'd expect to see in a place like this - a sculpture of a penguin and a miner. No, the heat hasn't gotten to you. These, and six other equally strange sculptures, are exhibits at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, a quirky, outdoor sculpture site near Rhyolite.
The Penguin and Prospector was done by the Belgian artist, Fred Bervoets, and is called "A tribute to Shorty Harris", a legendary local character who achieved fame/notoriety for his mining exploits and rags-to-riches-to-rags lifestyle in and around Death Valley and the Bullfrog Mountains. So much for the Prospector, but, what's the Penguin doing there? According to the artist, the penguin represents himself. He felt completely out of his element in the desert environment and he used a penguin to symbolize his feeling.
 Once you get past the penguin, the town has a few interesting ruins. Best preserved is the Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad Depot but the most interesting and most famous is the J. S. Cook Bank Building. Oddest building in town is the Bottle House (see photo at right), constructed entirely from, it is said, 50,000 whisky, soda, medicine and beer bottles, by Rhyolite saloon owner, Tom Kelly.
If you should ever find yourself in this part of Nevada with a little time on your hands, you could do worse than to spend a whimsical hour or two rubbing elbows with the ghosts of the past and the legends that still inhabit the fascinating ruins of Rhyolite.
Next Stop: Death Valley
Travel to One of These Other Fascinating Locations:
Sedona, AZ
Grand Canyon, AZ
Monument Valley, UT
Lake Powell, AZ
Zion NP, UT
Rhyolite, NV
And, Coming Very Soon...
Death Valley NP, CA
US 395 & Owens Valley, CA
Mono Lake, CA
Bodie, CA
Yosemite NP, CA
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