The Ghostly footprints

Today we set out to drive north to investigate the town of Bodie. We followed the 395 for some 50 miles and then turned off into the Bodie Hills for some 12 miles or so. Again the scenery is just stunning and just when you wonder where on earth you may end up Bodie comes into view. The site is now a State Park and only 5 percent remains of a Goldrush town that once had the reputation of the most lawless and wild settlement in California. WS Bodey found gold here in 1859, but died before seeing his discovery become a boomtown from 1877-1881, with a population of 8000 plus and over 100 million dollars worth of gold mined from 30 different mines in the locality.
There were more than 60 saloons and it even had its own Chinatown with opium dens. The decline set In quickly and the population dropped and continued to dwindle into the 1900s. Mining actually continued until 1942. Two fires destroyed a lot of the town and what you see today is preserved in a state of ‘arrested decay’. The end came quickly and as you wander round the ghostly remains, there are houses and a hotel, a school house, a general store and a Chinese laundry, the carpentry shop and fire station and a chapel. Everything is just as if the inhabitants walked out one day leaving their possessions and machinery where they fell. It has a real atmosphere and you can almost feel the ghosts of the people who lived, worked and played there over some 70 years. Life was undoubtedly hard. Snow could be twenty feet deep in winter, winds up to 100miles per hour and temperatures down to 30 or 40 below zero. However, the little museum displays cultural objects, children’s toys, New Year Dance cards and perhaps the most interesting item a tear phial. This was for use during the first year of mourning a loved one. You captured tears of loss and despair over the year and on the first anniversary of the death, they were poured on to your loved ones grave. One could imagine perhaps reaching the week before and suddenly realising that your phial was not half full - a quick visit to a nearly stream perhaps had to suffice! On the hillside above the town stands the remnants of the large Standard Mill and Mine and dotted throughout the hills are the metal derricks from much smaller establishments. The sun shone on us as we picked our way through the streets and imagined so easily what a vibrant and wild western frontier town must have been like.
On our way back to Mammoth we passed and investigated Mono Lake. The views from the road descending down towards the Lake are so beautiful and the Lake itself something of a living lesson in geology. In the 1950s Los Angeles spread it net wider and wider in its search for water to the detriment of the Eastern Sierras. It’s aqueduct robbed the area of a great deal of its surface water and as a result the level of the lake dropped by half and the remaining water became ever more saline and mineral rich. Great pinnacles and minarets of tufa revealed themselves from the depths of the lake, formed from the interaction of the sodium chloride and carbonate in its waters. The shoreline is like some alien landscape. I was reminded of the many Italian gardens we have visited over the years, all of whom have their mysterious grottos built from this porous craggy limestone and here you can actually see it in formation. A settlement has been reached to restore the water level to its former glory over the next ten years. Leaving the eerie Mono Lake, our way back to our hotel, took us via the June Lake scenic loop and boy is it ever scenic. This is an area of mountains and lakes and a playground, for hunting, shooting, fishing and hiking. There were old boys in rockers on the veranda of their log cabins, putting the world to rights. Others fishing and it all seemed a million miles away from the corporate America we see and hear so much of.Read more