Ghost Town Reflections: Bodie, California

Date:

Author: Janalyn Voigt

Categories: Lost in Time, My Guest Posts, Travel Journal

Last summer I joined extended family members on a road trip for what I termed the Great Grand Canyon Adventure. If you want to follow that trip, it begins with a bit of a snag on the journey from Washington to Oregon.

One of the side trips was to Bodie, California, a ghost town nestled high in the foothills of the eastern Sierra Nevadas, northeast of Yosemite. Ghost Town in the Shadow of the Sierra Nevadas was the travel journal I wrote from the road about the experience. I’ve reflected on my Bodie visit and shared some photographs you haven’t yet seen in Ghost Town Memories: Where the West was Wildest today on Christian Fiction Historical Society, the blog I team with 30 other historical fiction novelists to write. I’ve posted a lead-in to today’s post below. Enjoy!

Ghost Town Memories: Where the West was Wildest

The track beneath my tires wended its tortuous way through the foothills of the Eastern Sierra Nevadas. Other vehicles shared the road, some taking corners on two wheels, others crawling with too much caution. I chose a moderate approach, passing drivers with hands locked on steering wheels but giving way where possible to the restless herd behind me. Vehicles accelerated past, churning loose gravel as they hurtled through space and time, the drivers giving little regard it seemed for sanity. You had only to look into the ravine below to understand the dread of the slower drivers. I didn’t want to wind up there either, although the drop was less deep than many I’d encountered while driving through Yosemite National Park yesterday. At least today cars weren’t barreling towards me head-on in the middle of a narrow two-lane road with certain death mere inches from my tires. I’d arrived last night at the safety of the hotel on a wing and a prayer and possibly the last of my shredded nerves.

The winding road to Bodie proved a challenge.

I’d rather have lingered in bed, then afterwards warmed my belly with repeated cups of coffee at the restaurant over plate-sized chocolate chip pancakes than venture forth on a new adventure, and yet the children in our family group were not to be denied. My own curiosity drew me onward until the ghost town of Bodie sprawled through dry grass and sagebrush before me. Built on gold, liquor, opium dens and houses of ill repute, Bodie was renowned for its lawlessness, its reputation so notorious that a little girl whose family moved there from San Jose is said to have prayed, “Goodbye, God. We are going to Bodie in the morning.” (Source: Daily Bodie Standard, Bodie, CA, 13 February 1879)

I’d once visited this place as a young child on a family trip and had come away with the impression of sun-bleached buildings, scorching sunshine, and an abiding sense of history. Nothing seemed to have changed in the intervening years. Buildings over a hundred years old…Read More at Christian Fiction Historical Society.