Rhyolite Ghost Town

After the Tour of The Museum of Death, let's talk about a ghost town?
 

The Rhyolite is not in California but it’s a good tip for those driving from CA to Vegas. Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, Nevada, located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. 

I’ve been to this place in one of my trips to Vegas and loved it. There is absolutely nothing there besides ruins, but I found the place fantastic. It has an amazing Wild West feeling. It’s like been in a movie and Hollywood knows that. The site is often used as a location for films. The Cook Bank for example has been used in movie The Reward. The island also shot some scenes in Rhyolite. A tip: You should visit the Rhyolite during the day. Who knows what's out there at night. Lol

A little bit of history:

The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region's biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.

Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure, including piped water, electric lines and railroad transportation, that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town's peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.

 

 Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study's findings proved unfavorable, the company's stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite's population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.

After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were salvaged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

 

Source: Wikipedia