Ghost Town - Rhyolite, NV

When planning our route from Las Vegas to Death Valley, I was excited to find the National Park Service provides a map with several routes online. We could travel quickly and easily or we could take a more scenic route to explore the desert. Mona and I decided to add a little extra time on the road to follow the ghost town route.

About six miles outside of Beatty is the ghost town in Rhyolite, Nevada.  Rhyolite, named for the indigenous volcanic rock, was a settlement that boomed followed the discovery of nearby gold deposits only to be abandoned as soon as those deposits were exhausted and mines went bust. The ruins remain for tourists to explore.

What fascinates me about Rhyolite is the incredible growth and rapid decline that occurred within only a couple of decades. In 1904, Shorty Harris and Ed Cross discovered gold in southeastern Nevada.  As word of the find spread, thousands of hopeful prospectors descended upon the hills ready to stake their claims and potential fortunes. A gold rush was on.

By 1908, Rhyolite’s estimated population was between 5,000 and 8,000 people. The town had all the luxurious amenities of the era, including plumbing and electricity. There were three railroads serving the town. More than a mining encampment, Rhyolite was a thriving community with lodging houses, barbers, bakeries, and a school. Mona was amused there were 18 grocery stores (having grown up in a town that didn’t have even one). I was amused there were 50 saloons, though the number wasn’t unusually for the era. In 1880, Leavenworth Kansas had an estimated 150 saloons for 16,500 residents.   


But Rhyolite busted just as quickly as it boomed. Gold production dramatically dropped and the population went into decline. By 1920, only 14 people remained in Rhyolite.   The last resident passed away in 1924.

As we arrived in Rhyolite from Beatty, we escaped most of the storm. The dark clouds had cleared but there was still a strong, cold wind blowing over the desert. We parked by the old train depot and bundled up as best we could to explore the remains of the town.


Stonewalls with empty doorways and windows stand where businesses once thrived. Placards along the paved road show pictures of the buildings as they once were, a stark contrast to the rudimentary shapes of what remains. It was amazing to me that, in only 100 years, a town could be so thoroughly wiped from the landscape.

While most of the buildings are ruins, the exception is the Bottle House. Miner Tom Kelly built the house out of 50,000 glass beer and liquor bottles in 1907. With the aforementioned 50 saloons in town, materials weren’t hard to come by. Kelly never actually lived in the house. Instead, he raffled it off at $5.00 a ticket. A local family won the house and occupied it until the town went bust.


The Bottle House was not abandoned for long as Hollywood turned Rhyolite into a film set. Paramount Pictures refurbished the Bottle House and used the surrounding buildings as the setting for the 1925 silent film, The Air Mail. Over the years, Rhyolite has continued to serve as a film set for movies, including Michael Bay’s The Island in 2005. When not serving as a film set, the Bottle House was occupied by a series of caretakers. The last inhabitants finally left in 1969, though the miniature houses built by the family can still be seen on the surrounding lawn.


Rhyolite is an eerily beautiful place and I was profoundly affected by its story. I think it is at least partially because I live in a rural area where many small towns are disappearing. As the industries that once sustained them dwindle, people leave in search of better opportunities. Traveling for work, I see town squares with empty storefronts and houses abandoned by their owners. And I wonder, what will be there in 100 years? Will there be a house or just three walls and a roof, without a placard to tell us what used to be there?


Fresh Jerky – Beatty, Nevada

We left the Area 51 Alien Center and continued along the two-lane desert highway towards Beatty, Nevada. The storm clouds continued to hover overhead and I kept my hands tightly on the wheel to keep our car on the straight and narrow as gusts of wind continually barraged us. We entertained ourselves by listening to the Let’s Not Panic podcast archive until a new distraction appeared.

A white sign stating in bold black letters that fresh jerky was ahead. No other information. Just fresh jerky somewhere in the distance.

Clearly, someone had anticipated Mona and I traveling down this road. Mona once asked me if, forced to choose, I would give up bacon or jerky for the rest of my life. There was no contest. Jerky is our favorite snack for the road or the trail. I would give up a lot of things before I would ever give up jerky. For example, breathing. I’m pretty sure that in the absence of jerky I could hold my breath until jerky appeared.

After a few miles, the sign appeared again. Fresh jerky ahead. And again, no other information. Where was this jerky? How fresh was it exactly? They were taking great pains to emphasize its freshness without providing any other relevant information such as where it could be found. Apparently, this was the freshest of the fresh jerky. That’s why the adjective took precedence over the location.

I was so preoccupied by the mysterious jerky that I barely enjoyed swerving around the tumbleweed that passed in front of our car as I yelled, “We can’t stop here! This is bat country!” And that was something I had been enthusiastically planning to do ever since we decided to visit the desert. What a waste of a Hunter S. Thompson reference.

Ever nearer now, we continued to see the signs. There was jerky. And we were getting closer.


As we pulled into Beatty, the signs came in rapid succession. Now in red print there it was. Fresh! Jerky! Ahead! I hit the brakes and swerved into the gravel parking lot in front of a trailer that promised we had finally found our destination. Our manna in the desert. Our jerky.


Some may question why we would go into a random trailer and buy food. The answer is simple. The people by the side of the road sell the best food. When I travel throughout Kansas, anytime I see a guy with a smoker in a parking lot near an empty highway then I know he is going to have the best barbeque. Just like how the best sweet corn is bought from the back of a pickup truck. Those are the rules.

Inside the trailer, there was a variety of jerky on display as well as locally sourced honey available by the jar. We perused the walls where the varieties of jerky in vacuum sealed plastic wrappers. Behind the counter, there was a woman chopping up a variety of meats into small samplings. She invited us to taste samples of the jerky. I was grateful for the opportunity because I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choices. There was beef, elk, venison, and buffalo. We veered more towards the gamier meats. While living in an area where red meat and especially beef is very popular, I’ve always had a particular affinity towards buffalo. When we sampled the buffalo jerky, I was sold. It was deep and gamey with a rich, smoky flavor. We bought a pack for eight dollars and considered it a bargain.

Later on our hiking and camping trip with Trail Mavens , we found out that most of the women we were with had never had buffalo meat, let alone buffalo jerky. I chopped up our purchase into small pieces so everyone could have a sample and stored the remaining half in my pack.

Unfortunately, Mona and I would not get to enjoy the remaining delicious jerky. I left my pack on the floor at home and our dog, Chelsea, was clever enough to pull it out of the pocket and devour it. So there’s someone else in our house that would defy all constraints of time and space to get to jerky other than me. Our dog.

We did not receive any compensation from the delicious meat merchants or Trail Mavens for this post.