Ghosts of the Empty Lands East of the Sierra Nevada: The Town of Bodie

The Matterhorn Crest of the Sierra Nevada from Bridgeport. Bodie is another twenty miles to the east.

Central California is almost literally a "land flowing with milk and honey". The Great Valley (called by those who live elsewhere the Central Valley) is one of the richest agricultural regions on planet Earth, producing most of the nation's nuts, and a significant portion of its vegetables and fruits. And lots of honey, from the bee colonies used to pollinate the crops, and milk from the hundreds of dairy farms. The rich harvest is made possible by the imposing wall of the Sierra Nevada, a 400-mile-long mountain range that wrings out practically all the moisture in the storm systems that roll in from the northwestern Pacific Ocean. It is in so many ways a gentle land where extreme weather events are relatively rare (recent floods and droughts notwithstanding). The fault lines for which California is famous are relatively far to the west, so earthquakes don't often affect the towns and cities of the valley (although the possibility is certainly there).

But...rise above the valley floor and into mountains, and over the crest to the lands beyond to the east, and things change. The storms that bring so much richness to the west slopes are used up by the time they cross the crest, and often all they bring to the east is bitter cold dry winds. The forests, if they exist at all, are scraggly Pinon Pines and Utah Junipers. Most slopes are covered with drought tolerant sagebrush and rabbit brush. The growing season is measured in weeks, not months. Agricultural efforts in a harsh land like this are generally doomed to failure. In fact, the written history of the region is generally one of failure and disaster (the indigenous peoples of this land tell a different story of course; there is a difference between imposing one's will on a landscape versus surviving on the resources available).

In 1848, gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and hundreds of thousands of hopeful people converged on the Mother Lode with their dreams of avarice, or at least dreams of a better life. A few of them got rich, some of them barely got by, and many failed. Many of them walked and rode from Mexico and Central America, others came from the east coast by ship, and some courageous, but perhaps foolhardy people walked across the vast desert between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. Mere survival was the challenge for many of them, and a fair number didn't. Imaginative minds could hear the cries of those lost in the howling winds.

The damage at the top of the brick building was from a 5.7 magnitude earthquake last year. It closed the park for several months.

The Gold Rush lasted for half a decade before the rivers were depleted of their riches, and most of the gold that remained could only be mined by methods that required vast amounts of money from investors. There wasn't much left for the individual prospector to search for, and thousands of hungry miners began to consider the barren lands east of the Sierra Nevada that they had traversed years earlier. Men began to creep back over the Sierra Nevada and began searching the empty lands beyond. As usual, most failed in their efforts, but others found riches. One man managed both. W.S. Bodey found a ledge of gold ore in the barren hills north of Mono Lake in 1859, but before he could enjoy his discovery, he froze to death in the harsh winter. A few others worked the ledges in the years that followed, but it wasn't until 1876 that a truly rich lode was found. Investors were brought in, a series of mines, including the Standard Mine, were established, and by 1880, a town of 10,000 people had risen from the sagebrush. The city was called Bodie (Bodey's name was apparently altered to make the pronunciation clearer).

The town developed a fearsome reputation. In the harsh climate, there were few amenities besides drinking, and deadly conflicts were a constant part of life. One legend stated that a young girl, upon finding that she would be moving there wrote "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie" (a town has pride, and an editor for the local paper said the punctuation was wrong; she had actually said "Good, by God, I'm going to Bodie").

The mines were successful for a few decades, producing perhaps 2 million ounces of gold, but by 1913 the Standard Mine shut down, and people drifted away. 2,000 buildings were scattered across the valley, occupied by perhaps a few hundred people. A fire in 1932 destroyed most of the buildings, but 167 of them survived. Concerns about vandalism led to the establishment of Bodie Historical State Park in 1962, and efforts were made to stabilize what buildings remained. What's left is one of the most picturesque ghost towns to be found in the American West. The only residents today are a few rangers, and the ghosts. I'm not usually superstitious, but I would be just a little creeped out living there. I see the signs that say that all visitors must be gone by nightfall, and I wonder...why?

We visited the park at the end of September during our fall field studies trip, and the day was comfortable, not too warm, not too windy, but I found out later that overnight Bodie had been the coldest spot in the entire United States at 16 degrees (the hottest spot at 104 degrees was Death Valley; we were halfway between the two that night). Snow had fallen less than a week earlier, and snow fell again a few days later. And this was the "nice" time of year.

The Standard Mine mill and the once-proposed open pit mine on the hill beyond.

The Bodie Hills are the remains of four stratovolcanoes that were active 8-14 million years ago. Hydrothermal activity around hot springs associated with the volcanism was responsible for the emplacement of the ores. Gold resources certainly remains, and because the gold claims were still valid, efforts were made in the 1990s to mine the hill above the town by way of open pit mining. Millions were expended in exploration and public relations, but eventually the lands were withdrawn from mineral speculation, and the ghosts of Bodie will be able to rest in relative peace.

If you want to visit, information about the park can be found here: http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509.

The Richest Mineral Resources in Death Valley: Isolation and Gullibility

A great many dreams lie broken in the rock and gravel expanses of Death Valley National Park. The California Gold Rush had brought hundreds of thousands of people to the state in the 1850s, and though few of them ever actually became rich, there was always the hope of the next big mother lode was somewhere out there in the wastelands that lay east of the Sierra Nevada. Hungry miners fanned out from the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode in a sometimes desperate search for riches in the desert.

Sometimes there was success, most notably at Bodie and Cerro Gordo, and at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. But most of the time the miners came up empty. And sometimes worse. Morris Titus was a prospector in 1906 who lost his life somewhere in the depths of the canyon that now bears his name. It's also the canyon we are exploring today in this blog post.

There will always be people with more money than they know what to do with, and they will always want more of it. And there will always be other people devising ways to separate such people from their money. Why put your life and health at risk in a hard country when you can just as easily succeed by convincing others to do the work and take the risks for you?

Such was the story of Leadfield in Titus Canyon. Off to the east, the town of Rhyolite had a mildly successful run as a gold mining town, lasting from 1905 to 1911, so the idea of a new discovery of ore was not unexpected. Some ores of lead may have actually existed in the area. But transporting those ores would be a problem. They needed to be taken to Beatty, Nevada, 20 miles as the crow flies, but crows don't live in Death Valley. They needed to take the ores through the narrows of Titus Canyon (often closed by flash floods) down into Death Valley, over Daylight Pass, and then to Beatty, a distance of 70 miles. And the ores really weren't all that valuable. If anyone was going to get rich from mining at Leadfield, they needed a different approach. Enter the entrepreneur Charles Julian (entrepreneur in this instance translates to "con-man").

The most valuable resource of Leadfield was isolation (of the town) and gullibility (of the investors). Rich investors tend to live in cities, and know little of geology. They are the kind of people who could be convinced that the ores at Leadfield would be transported down the canyon to paddlewheel steamers on the floor of fricking Death Valley, the driest place in North America (sorry for the near-profanity). This was an actual insinuation made by the promotional materials for the "boom" town.

The promoters of the town hacked out a road directly from Beatty to Leadfield (It's now Titus Canyon Road, the one we followed on our tour), and in March of 1926, more than 300 potential investors and hundreds of local miners crowded the site of the new town, and Leadfield was born. A post office was established in August of 1926, and it closed for good five months later. The town, which for several months boasted a population of 300, was deserted in less than a year. And Julian had disappeared with a lot of money (he died by his own hand only a few years later in Shanghai at the age of 40). Lots of gold and silver had been produced (from the pockets of the investors). Not an ounce of actual ore was ever shipped.

I wonder sometimes what life was like in a town founded on fraud and hopeful dreams. What did people do? They opened stores, hotels, and blacksmith shops, and I guess people sort of milled around wondering where to dig. At what point did people start to realize they had been conned? Those were my thoughts as we explored the handful of structures that still remain. Someone had dug a fairly extensive shaft, but I found not a trace of galena or any other lead-bearing minerals in the tailings.

It's nice to know that we live in a day and age when nobody could ever be swayed into investing in shady mining operations on the basis of slickly produced promotional materials. Surely such things don't happen today...if you agree, well, have I got a proposal for you...

Why yes, this 13 pound gold nugget came from my mine. How could you doubt me???

For an account of Leadfield's history, check out the 1957 article by the late great California travel writer Russ Leadabrand: http://www.dezertmagazine.com/mine/1957DM01/index.html.

From a Land of Riches to the Barrens: The Basin and Range

We set off early today on our journey of exploration on the Colorado Plateau, but to get to the plateau we needed to travel nearly 500 miles from California's Great Valley to Las Vegas, passing through some of the loneliest landscapes to be found in the United States. I couldn't help but notice how we also passed from a land flowing literally with milk and honey (dairy farms and beekeepers among the thousands of farms) to a barren landscape where life must be grasped and fought for. We crossed Tioga Pass, which despite the frighteningly dry year was still mantled with some snowfields, and into the Basin and Range Province east of the Sierra Nevada. The difference was striking.

The Basin and Range Province happened because a high plateau-like region with rivers extending from at least central Nevada to the Pacific was stretched to the breaking point. About 29 million years ago, the subduction zone that had dominated the tectonic history of the Western United States for nearly 180 million years was destroyed by a process that resulted in the formation of the San Andreas fault. The crusted extended and broke into numerous fault block mountains (horsts) and deep fault valleys (grabens). The Sierra Nevada was the largest and highest of these fault blocks and as a consequence, the mountains prevent most of the rain and snow from ever reaching the lands to the east.

The Sierra Nevada is the realm of the cool dark forests and the high glaciated peaks. The Basin and Range is a place where sagebrush reigns, and practically the only trees are dumpy little pinyon pines and juniper. It's a hard dry land. We crossed Montgomery Pass into Nevada and had a close look at Boundary Peak, which at 13,147 feet (4,007 m), is the highest point in Nevada. Ironically it is not the highest peak in the mountain range in which it is situated. Adjacent Montgomery Peak is 13,441 feet (4,097 m) tall, but as the name suggests, the state boundary falls between the two. A bit farther south, White Mountain Peak soars to 14,252 ft (4,344 m), the third highest peak in California.

It's a hard land, but that doesn't mean that life doesn't thrive. We were lucky to see some members of the Montgomery Pass herd of wild horses right next to the highway. Horses came to America with the Spaniards in the 1500s and escapees over the centuries formed naturalized herds across the west. In a sense though, these horses are returnees to a long-lost homeland. The horses evolved in North America, and migrated to Asia over the Bering Land Strait, but about 12,000 years ago they became extinct in the land of their origin.

I took a new road today, the highway through Dyer and Fish Lake Valley. It is a beautiful place, and few hundred ranchers and farmers make a living off the small streams that flow off the White Mountains and from the copious amounts of Pleistocene groundwater that lies hidden beneath the valley floor (a nonrenewable resource though; they're using up the water that arrived there during the Ice Ages).

Others tried to wrest life from the land, but in a different way. When the California Gold Rush petered out in the 1850s, hungry miners scoured the lands to the east for the next great Mother Lode. Their searches were most often futile, but a few rich mines were discovered (such as the Comstock Lode), and other towns were built on dreams of avarice, but not much more. Such was the fate of Palmetto in western Nevada. There are only a few structures remaining, carved out of the rhyolite tuff that covers much of the region. For a time, several hundred miners pitched camp here, looking for plays of valuable minerals in the rocks, but they found little and quickly abandoned the site.

The desert has reclaimed much of the old town, except a few buildings which stand only because...well, I don't know how the wall below is still standing.

The miners could look out a window and see the sometimes snow-capped summit of White Mountain Peak in the distance, dreaming of water and riches, but having neither. A barren land, yes, but rich in other ways. The geology exposed in these barren mountains is fascinating, and volcanoes and earthquakes show that the crust here is still very active.

This is one of my favorite regions on the planet...