This morning we said goodbye to our dispersed camping spot near Mammoth Lakes, dumped and filled at Convict Lake, and headed North.  We waved to this helpful roadside reminder:

When I was in high school, I would sometimes wear a Bodie T-shirt to school.  Apparently, this was so amusing to some that I was voted “most likely to become mayor of Bodie” by my class.

Today, the mayor has returned:

Bodie was a gold rush town in the Eastern Sierras that is maintained in a state of arrested decay, so buildings are not improved but are repaired to prevent them from collapsing.  The town reached its peak in the 1880s and was completely abandoned by the 1950s.

Houses were often shingled with flattened out kerosene containers:

There was a rich guy in town:

We peeked in the window of the local gym:

These pumps are “pay inside” only:

The vault is all that remains of this bank:

The gold processing mill sits above the town:

This is the second school in town, as the first one was burned down by one of the students:

The most interesting aspect of the town for me was this structure.  Electricity was delivered to here via power lines from a waterwheel attached to a generator, positioned 13 miles away.  It was the first time in history that electricity was delivered over a distance via wires.  The poles, some of which are still standing, are in a perfect line as engineers of the time were concerned that the electricity would fall off the wire if there was a bend in the line:

The hotel lobby:

We continued North to Reno, Nevada, where we overnighted at the Atlantis Casino.  See the trip map for details.