Hey Bodie! Sierra Trip Report #1
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!
Bodie is sprawling. Only about 10% of the town’s building still stand. The gold mines that produced over $100 Million are atop the hills in the distance.
Perhaps the best part of Bodie is the disjointed geometry of the buildings. Few are level, and most are askew. I found the way that this old hotel and store seem to be holding each other up quite charming.
The people tasked with keeping Bodie in a state of “arrested decay” have taken to using a lot of heavy bracing to keep the remaining structures from succumbing to gravity.
You can’t venture into many of the buildings at Bodie, but you can peer into the windows. Within you’ll find peeling wallpaper, dusty relics of past inhabitants, and drooping ceilings. This home is in better shape than most. The owners chose an embossed tin ceiling, which has done a good job of keeping the elements at bay.
Speaking of embossed tin, this shack is a patchwork of sheet metal. It seems the people of Bodie had easy access to metal as it’s found everywhere serving as siding and roofing. Anything besides the gold-bearing ore pulled from the ground would have had to come overland from towns far from Bodie.
One can understand why sheet metal would have been the preferred material for protection from the brutal sun and wind of the high desert. Wood planks would shrink, warp and fray leaving gaps.
Some of the homes in Bodie were quite fancy given their remote location. I found a few homes with bay windows and elaborate trim. This house sits on a hillside with a view fo the stamping mill. That mill was tasked with breaking down the rocks coming from the mine into dust so the gold could be extracted. Six days a week, around the clock the heavy steam-driven iron hammers of the stamping mill would pound rock. Imagine that! Every few seconds for most of the week you’d hear the loud “bang, bag, bag” of that mill.
While some of Bodie’s homes were fairly lavish, this humble little house was anything but. It’s located right next to the stamping mill and couldn’t have held much more than a bed and a table.
I noticed that many of the homes had canvas ceilings and sometimes walls. I’m assuming it would have been much cheaper to finish the inside of a humble home with canvas, but it couldn’t have afforded much warmth in those brutal winters.
When the nights are cold a little companionship would prove most desirable. At the end of town was a street named Maiden Lane, (backed by Virgin Alley). Nothing remains of it now, but the tiny houses of the “ladies of the night” were immensely popular.
Not far from Maiden Lane is the town jail. The door bears testament to the rugged men who were held there.
The mines and stamping mill are reflected in a shop’s front windows. To support the mining in Bodie, many businesses lined the main drags of town. I think this one was a barber shop.
Of course, the town had a few banks. All that remains of this one is the vault. With millions of dollars in gold coming from Bodie’s mines, the banks were busy. I read that they would cast the gold into 120-pound ingots to discourage theft.
One could spend all day walking around Bodie.
These homes are scattered around the hillside next to the stamping mill. It’s easy to imagine people walking to work and school up and down the narrow roads. Some days would have been pleasant strolls and others bracing races through freezing cold snow.
I’m not sure if Bodie had more than one church when it was home to 10,000 people. The only reaming church sits in the center of town and features tall windows and a towering steeple. Next door were some of the nicer homes of the town.
The church even had an organ. I can’t even imagine the trouble that was taken to transport that thing from San Francisco.
It’s not clear if these tin strips were recycled cans or some other containers, but the owner of this building had enough of them to shingle the entire place.
As a history nut, I love the relics of Bodie. From discarded bottles and jars to broken furniture, the place is littered with the things people used. As a photographer, I really appreciated the variety of textures these items provide.
The sagebrush, the rusting metal, and the abundant weathered wood all make Bodie a wonderful place to explore. This home had the most unusual bay window.
I love that the town has building after building with windows you can gaze through. Each gives another dusty look into the lives of the people of Bodie.
The sawmill in Bodie was one of the highlights for me. It was a chaotic jumble of slumping angles and rusty machines. I also loved finding the old power poles in parts of Bodie, glass insulators intact.
In a place where there are no trees, each plank in Bodie would have come to be by a long process of finding logs, transporting them over the mountains and then sawing them. Every board would have been precious.
There were bricks to be had in Bodie as well, but I could only find a few buildings made of them. This one caught the afternoon’s smoky light perfectly.
Finally, this is what I looked like after my afternoon at Bodie. The day began at 5a.m. when we packed up our camp and drove over Tioga Pass from Yosemite Valley to Mono Lake. After shooting at Mono Lake for a while (in the hot sun), we spent about four hours at Bodie. Bring a good jacket, hat, sunscreen and lots of water. It’s a tough place, but I loved it. This is a good tired.