A long time ago
In a County far, far away
GOLD RUSH
Prospectors, including W.S. Bodey, found gold in present day Mono County in 1859. Together, they founded a little mining town that later came to be known as: Bodie
The group's fearless leader, Bodey, didn't live to see the town flourish and be named after him as he died the following November in a blizzard.
May be a good thing since people could never get this name straight and the town was named Bodey, then Body, and finally, Bodie as a painter mislabeled a stables in nearby Aurora as Bodie Stables. I think that would be hurtful!
Bodie is quite an amazing ghost town to visit. It is pretty large and it's said that it would take at least 5 hours to see all the buildings. I can attest that on this visit in late October 2015, I got to Bodie at about 10:00 a.m. and stayed until about 4:00 p.m. and still didn't see everything! Although I did visit a lot of the outlying houses and wandered around quite a bit so that might have had something to do with it.
I got to Mono County at the crack of dawn as I wanted to take photos at Mono Lake and hopefully catch the sunrise. You can see those gorgeous photos by clicking on this sentence! Mono Lake and it's very cool Tufa is an amazing place to visit in and of itself.
Word of caution: Bodie is at the end of Highway 270 off of Highway 395 and 270 becomes a very rough road about halfway there. And currently, the restrooms (which are amazingly nice normally) are closed due to the December 2016 earthquakes. They do have porta-potties set up though.
And now on to the photos.
I'm going to warn you that I have 90-something photos. So of course I'm not going to put them all in this post. I'm going to split it up into categories. And this first category is:
The 'Burbs
I was pretty into weird self-portraits on this day. I call this next one "Self-Portrait of a Ghost".
I called this the "Fancy House" because it has a really cool porch and just looked, well...fancy!
But even so, the outhouse is miles away! Especially when you have to go at 2:00 a.m.
This was another house that was mostly intact, but obviously had a fire and general damage. Most of the windows/doors had wide chicken wire over them which I was able to shoot through.
Same house with bowed walls.
This is the water spigot and pail for the Fancy House. It was about 30 feet in front of the porch.
Rusty saw and tin can top I found on the ground near the Fancy House.
Self-portrait on the porch of the Fancy House.
The leaning outhouse of the Fancy House.
Tin Can Dump near Fancy House
Rusted old car - love the steering wheel sticking up!
Getting closer to town.
We'll end this post with another outhouse because they're so fun and fascinating!
TTFN!
xoxo
