From Ghost Town to thriving Metropolis through the Valley of Death.

Rhyolite - 40 years ago
While participating with an Explorer Scout troop in 1968, which specialized in desert exploration, we ended up in Rhyolit after spending the day at the Mint 400 desert auto race. There was a terrible sand storm blowing, winds about 50 mph and you could not see anything. We took shelter in the abandoned and dilapidated three story bank building, the only place secure enough to endure the wind and sand was one of the two old bank vaults. We could not get our gear into the upper vault as it had been stripped of the bank flooring, so we sheltered in teh lower one which smelled really bad, worse that a port-o-potty. The next day we went to an old railroad station in town that had been set up as a museum, one of the few remaining buildings in tact. It was being run by an old lady. She asked about our small group, and we told her that we had sheltered in the lower vault at the old bank. A grim look came over her face and she informed us that a few days before the police had recovered a completely nude, male body with the finger chopped off and the head missing - obviously a mob hit in her words. Thus explained the smell - The town itself back then was actually very interesting historically, as it had been one of the largest towns in Nevada with over 35,000 inhabitants, three major railroads and no less than five major banks. When the government reduced the price of gold, the mines laid off workers on a temporray basis expecting the price of goald to resume at it's original rate. Many of the peopel who were originally from other states as far back as the eats coast packed up their bags for a trip not much different than a vacation. Gold did not increase, the mines stayed closed and people did not return, some had even left their doors unlocked and wash hanging on the lines drying in the desert sun. The reason Rhyolite lookes the waty it does is that building materials were very scarce in teh desert, and when the railroads quit running to that town, people would just strip all the buildings of anything useful. The shell of thebank survived because it was reinforced concrete - no way to take it way by theives.