During our recent trip to Mammoth Lakes, we took a trip out to Bodie State Historic Park. It’s an old gold mining ghost town and I was expecting a one street town with a saloon, jail and places to tie up horses, just like an old cowboy film. But Bodie is so much bigger than this, and I was surprised. At its hey day 10,000 people lived in the town, it was bigger than Los Angeles which only had 3,000 residents.
The town is named for Waterman S. Body (William Bodey) who found gold in the hills in 1875 but the boom was short lived and by the 1940s the town had been abandoned. It became a state park in 1962 and is maintained in a state of ‘arrested decay.’
There are streets to wander down, an old mine, a church, gas station and a bank. Some of the buildings have furniture left inside from when it was abandoned and the museum has a huge amount of items which really gives you a sense of what the town was like, the clothes people were wearing and the lives they were experiencing.
Even the red lamp used by a well-known lady of the night, Rosa May, is there. You can see Rosa’s gravestone just outside of the graveyard because she wasn’t respectable enough to be included inside the fence.
You soon come to realize that life at Bodie was tough, really tough. Many children died during the freezing winters and there were lots of saloon brawls, stage holdups and killings on almost a daily basis. Before leaving to go and live in Bodie, one child wrote in her diary, ‘Good bye God, I’m going to Bodie.’
The boys were fascinated by the letters in the museum from the various people who had taken things from Bodie, old nails or pieces of glass, only to have a run of bad luck. The visitors have sent back the items along with letters pleading for forgiveness in the hope that their run of bad luck will end.
During the summer months, you can reach Bodie via a 3-mile dirt road. The park is northeast of Yosemite just south of Bridgeport on Highway 395. The park is open year round although in the winter it is only accessible via skis, snowshoes or snow mobile. I’d love to visit then and experience a winter day there. I can imagine it would be brutal.
The state park warns you ‘This is a real ghost town; splinters; nails and broken glass are everywhere.’ Just don’t take anything!
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