The lack of water and therefore vegetation in much of the Western U.S. has one great advantage: the underlying geology is much easier to see and appreciate. Here are a couple of pictures of the hills surrounding Rhyolite, showing the quite dramatic tilting of sedimentary layers.
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A number of the structures are pretty well preserved, which isn't surprisingly, since it has been just under a century since Rhyolite was abandoned, and this is a pretty dry climate. This was the train station.
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Here's the north face of the station. I don't know if there was a later attempt to resurrect the building as a casino, or if this was someone's attempt at humor.
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I see that a number of movies were filmed at least partly at Rhyolite, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, when the town had only been abandoned for a few years.
There's an old railroad car nearby--missing the trucks.
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And the interior, painted in a truly unique color.
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A lot of people come out to places like this and are appalled at the amount of trash left, largely as ancient tin cans.
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Instead of regarding these as trash piles, I like to think of them as the next generation's cultural anthropology field project. I suspect that someone will spend a summer categorizing and counting the tin cans in the various heaps, and then producing a elaborate statistical model showing correlation between location (and therefore socioeconomic status) and what the locals ate.
These are the buildings whose pictures you normally see of Rhyolite in books about ghost towns.
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This is the school--a rather elaborate structure, considering how short a time this town existed.
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It appears to have been a two story building, apparently with entirely wooden interior structures. I should have taken some pictures of the interior.
Here's the Cook Bank Building.
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It's really quite elaborate inside--with what appears to be at least two separate vaults, one below ground, one above ground.
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There's just enough of the exterior surviving to show that it was quite decorated.
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This building across the street appears to have been a storefront--and someone was planning to be in business there for a while--or why else have your business name carved in stone?
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Here's a building in surprisingly good condition, and because of that, less poignant, and probably therefore less photographed.
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You get closer and you find out why it is in such good condition--like many ghost towns, the toughest building is the jail. If it was hard to break out of, or to break into, it puts up a fight against the elements.
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There were a lot of houses here, but all that remains of most of them are the rock lined cellars.
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Of course, the town existed because of mining, and there's plenty of mine shafts visible on the hill.
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This mine shaft is no more than five feet tall. Being a miner was not a job for claustrophobics.
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I think that single tiny spot of safety orange in one of the mine shaft holes is probably a warning sign.
I'm quite sure that the street signs are a recent addition to help you appreciate the town.
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UPDATE: The old train depot became the Rhyolite Ghost Casino in 1937. The book at that link gives a bit of a history of the collapse of Rhyolite, and attempts to revive it. Among the more interesting aspects:
In 1986 the Stonewall Park Development Corporation attempted to purchase the ghost town to form the nation's first homosexual community. The county soundly rejected the idea.
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