Bodie is a photography buffet. Anyone who grew up watching westerns or Little House on the Prairie would find the dusty streets of this abandoned gold rush town familiar. There’s the town church with its pointed steeple. Just down and around the corner is the old general store, and a few doors down the saloon. Bodie is the classic old western mountain mining town pretty much as it was back in the day, but instead of streets filled with carousing miners and the incessant pounding of the hillside stamping mill, visitors find meandering tourists and an eerie silence of a place that simply stopped being.
California’s state park department owns Bodie now, and they do an admirable job of keeping it from crumbing into the dirt and sage brush. The relentless sun, wind and mountain snows work at the exposed wood, metal and glass of the town, leaving it deeply weathered and incredibly photogenic. On my recent road trip with Jeff Carlson, we spend a few hours in Bodie photographing the intriguing old ghost town. This post is a smattering of my images with minimal commentary. Enjoy!