After touring Death Valley we somehow got lost heading the wrong direction from the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes toward Kings Canyon National Park and Sequoia National Park on California 190. Being a former student of geography I did eventually realize the sun was settling into a slumber in the western sky and that we should be going east to get back to Las Vegas.
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The road was deserted, as far as one could see. Turning back to the east we headed through Stovepipe Wells and on toward Chloride City on Daylight Pass Road. Daylight Pass heads NE from near the junction of California 190 and Scotty's Castle Road (which was closed). I had gotten out an old fashioned road map as nothing was working (GPS, phone) and figured we were heading more or less toward Beatty, Nevada which was out of the way but looked interesting nonetheless. I should note that Chloride City is a ghost town but I couldn't figure how to get there. It is just as well as it appears that there is little left there and one would probably do best in a 4-wheel drive vehicle when making the trek 6,000 feet up into the Funeral Mountains on gravel roads to get to Chloride City.
After a long climb up into the northern Funeral Mountains, at the top of the Pass just north of Chloride City, I stopped and turned back to Death Valley taking this shot.
When we got to the Nevada State Line there wasn't much there. The land becomes flat and desolate, again. The only thing around was this cattle grate over an arroyo.
A few miles into Nevada we came across a sign for the Rhyolite ghost town and we could see it up on the side of the Bullfrog Hills. The town looked to be about 4,000 feet above sea level from our vantage point at about 3,500 feet above sea level on Nevada 374. After a short drive up the Bullfrog Hills we came to this building, the ruins of the Cook Bank. Elevation 3,819 feet (1,164 m).
Once several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills, the largest mine in the area, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, is nearby. The town's population peaked around 1907-08 at between 3,500 and 5,000. It's population declined quickly after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and the 1907 financial panic. By 1920 the population of Rhyolite was close to zero.
Today the town is home to a rather unusual outdoor art museum, the Goldwell Open Air Museum.
The ghostly sculptures at Rhyolite were sculpted by the late Belgian artist Albert Szukalski. They appear to me as phantasmal sentinels on the mostly quiet, windswept desert. That isn't quite what the artist had in mind according to descriptions I've read (more on that below).
"Ghost Rider" (1984)
by Albert Szukalaski
"Desert Flower" (1989)
by Albert Szukalski
"Tribute to Shorty Harris" (1994)
by Fred Bervoets
Among the artists that have contributed work to the museum, probably the one who felt most out of place in the desert was Belgian artist Fred Bervoets, appointed a Knight of the Order of Leopold II by the King in 1988. His “portrait” sculpture of Shorty Harris (an early miner in Death Valley and its environs) and a penguin has elicited countless questions. The miner makes sense, but why the Antarctic bird? Word has it that Bervoets wanted to include in his sculpture an indication of how “alien” he felt in the Nevada desert. The penguin was the most out of place entity the artist could think of to represent his own feelings of displacement under the Mojave sun, a self-portrait then as a penguin in the desert.
One of three bottle houses built in Rhyolite, this was the largest and has been restored a couple of times in the past 100 years. You see a lot of these houses in the desert, some elaborate, some not so much. It is said that the bottles offer natural insulation from the extreme heat and cold of the desert.
In 1925 Paramount Studios made a movie in Rhyolite, using the Bottle House. The town was pretty well deserted by then and a few repairs were needed on the old house. The movie was, "The Airmail" starring Warner Baxter, Billy Dove and Douglas Fairbanks.
Four of eight reels of the silent movie survive at the Library of Congress. "The Airmail", or what's left of it, was restored by the Library. What survives is the footage of Billie Dove's screen time in the picture, and as such has some historic value to cinema buffs. It also offers glimpses of a very young Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Enjoy. Don't Destroy Your American Heritage
Vandalism is a huge problem in ghost towns, parks, National Monuments, etcetera, across the west. Rhyolite is pretty well protected with fences and gates and cameras around the most sensitive ruins which kind of spoils the ambience of the place. It is shameful that fences and barbed wire are necessary. It is our collective heritage that is preserved in these places.
There is a rock labyrinth (maze) at Rhyolite built by unknown artists. It is about the size of the Land's End Labyrinth in San Francisco that was destroyed by vandals in August of 2015.
The Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad Depot at Rhyolite is fenced off to prevent vandalism. It was the first railroad to reach the Bullfrog Mining District. The Depot was abandoned soon after it was completed as the town's fortunes changed. It later became a private home, then a boarding house and mess hall, business offices, and finally a casino and bar. Today it is held by the Bureau of Land Management in "arrested decay."
Pretty much all that remains of the Porter Brothers General Store is the facade and the north wall. It closed in 1910, two years after it was completed.
Click on the images above and below for a larger view. At dusk, looking toward Death Valley, you can see the ruins of the Rhyolite School. In 1968, RCA Records poured a cement floor in the schoolhouse and hung velvet drapes on the open windows. They used the building to throw a large party to their distributors for their outstanding record sales. For a long time afterward you could see the velvet curtains still blowing in the wind from the crumbling structure. That image has been repeated in countless movies over the years. Read about the original surreal party and velvet drapes at this link: Rhyolite Nevada, Surreal Experience, by Jack Castor.
The Last Supper
The most striking of the sculptures at Rhyolite is "The Last Supper" (1984). Albert Szukalski was attracted to the Mojave Desert for many reasons, not the least of which was the Mojave's resemblance to the deserts of the Middle East.
There, he constructed a modern day representation of Christ's Last Supper, close to Death Valley (where he originally wanted it sited). Working essentially from Leonardo Da Vinci's fresco of the Last Supper within the desert environment, Szukalski succeeded in blending the two disparate elements into a unified whole. Maintaining the staging of the figures in Leonardo's work and placing it in the American Southwest allowed the artist to meld Western Artistic tradition with the vast landscape of the New World.
We lucked into the perfect golden, ghostly light for these images of "The Last Supper," but as fate would have it there was a car that approached just as the sun reached the golden hour in the far western sky. In photography, the golden hour (or magic hour) is a period shortly after sunrise or before sunset when daylight is redder and softer than when the Sun is higher in the sky. In other words its the perfect time for photos that would otherwise appear washed out by intense sunlight.
Anyway, from that car (mind you we're out in the middle of nowhere) emerged a most obnoxious older man who was tutoring several women on how to make photographic images. They were all over the sculptures just as the light was right, so I had to move around them snapping photos that cropped the obnoxious teacher and his students from view.
I could have taught them something about taking great photos. Easy. Take lots and lots of them. Pick the ones you like, and don't annoy people around you while you're at it.
Alas, it was too cool for rattlesnakes viewing last week.
We've Read and Watched:
The AMC drama returns for its second season on Feb. 15, 2016.
A new half-joking app (built with real Bureau of Labor Statists data) to help you fairly split your bill when you're dining out with friends.
Confronted by a middle-aged gay man and his mother, Senator Marco Rubio (aka RobotRubio) walks away. He has little to say about women's rights or reproductive freedom either, because he and Ted Cruz vehemently oppose a women's right to choose. Is this really the best we can do?
Living in Florida all our lives and spending a lot of time in the hammocks and jungles of Florida we know we something about protection from mosquitoes. First, wear long sleeves and pants, socks, shoes and gloves, even if its 98ยบ in the shade with 90% humidity. Second, keep a hat handy for swatting away the pesky insects. If you're really into going the chemical route, however, your best bet is Deep Woods OFF or some other 25% DEET product. Note, however, that this stuff will eat the paint off your car. So it probably is not the best idea to be slathering it all over your body, especially sensitive skin areas like around your eyes, under arms, etc. Using something like Repel 100 with 98% DEET is downright scary despite the fact that most science says DEET is perfectly safe.
Reviews of the science answers: Yes. We still question why the stuff will eat the paint off a car (or other surfaces), but use it if you must.