The Old West

Wild West Spirits

Rhyolite is a Ghost town which once was a gold mining town in Nevada. When I lived out west I was able to explore the desert and had always wanted to visit Rhyolite because a railroad once went there. The depot still stands although deserted and desolate and even an old railroad signal can be seen still attempting to give signals to some ghost train only it may see. I forgot to mention that I wrote this little tune as an exercise for students learning the 5th string. It is one of the tunes in my Guitar Journey Book. Anyway back to Rhyolite, you know there is a little house made of bottles there and you will see a couple pics in this video. I couldn't find all my photos which bummed me out because I have some really nice ones I wanted to add. When I was in Death Valley it was early march and it was only about 75 degrees. The record heat temperature is 136 degrees. I have been in 124 degrees before and that was brutal. I actually spent the night in Rhyolite with a friend,. I had this pickup with a camper shell. We wanted to say we spent a night in a Ghost town. A policeman drove by at sunset and asked us if we were sure we wanted to do that. I guess there were many strange reports that had happened out here so far away from civilization. We told him yes. He was one of the two officers that drove once a day to check on the town since it is a historic site and no artifacts can be removed. I would have never spent the night by myself but with someone else it was easier to bear. The one strange thing that did happen, that to this day my friend and I cannot explain is we seen a panoramic orange flash over the west mountain range, I mean it covered the entire length of it. We did not think it could be heat lightning because it was early march and that did not look like heat lightning at all and is was only 47 degrees at night.As a matter of fact in another pic I have I am wearing a coat. We both seen it and the hair raised up on our arms about half of an inch high. We did manage to get to sleep that night but it was not easy. We were so freaked out by it. It wasn't the northern lights either. We arose the next morn and went to another ghost town nearby. It was another Gold mining town called Bullfrog. The story behind Rhyolite is that in the early 1900s they could not find any more gold there, so as fast as the town grew it then started to be forsaken. The story is that if the miners would have just dug three more feet into the hill in which they were mining, they would have struck the motherload of Gold, but they gave up and deserted Rhyolite. Decades passed before Gold miners ventured out there again and they found that motherload. To this day Gold is mined just on the other side of that same mountain. Rhyolite might have been a thriving community today, but now it is just a ghost town. If you search the internet on Rhyolite, NV. you can see some historic pics and some more of the ghost town. If I remember correctly the town was about 150 miles or so from Las Vegas where I once lived. Living out west and visiting some of these places were surreal. There actually was a "Wild West" that the old movies portray. It was real and the western United States still has many remnants of it. While in Moapa NV (third pic in Video) I went inside the old wooden structure and the floor was filled with old papers and bottles etc. I picked up a few interesting pieces of paper and they were dated back to the mid 1950's. Hard to imagine this mess laying here all these years. Because of the dry climate alot of this is preserved somewhat. I still have a handful of those papers from that little building. Hope you enjoy the tune. (I had to upload this a second time because I forgot to add a pic of the Rhyolite Depot. How could I have forgotten that one?)

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