죽기전에 꼭 가봐야할 자연절경 70,.Death Valley, Rhyolite Ghost Town

데쓰밸리는 죽기전에 꼭 가봐야할 자연절경에 올린곳입니다.

하지만 이곳에 다시 올리는건 부분적으로 타이틀이 어울리지 않는 곳도 있기때문에

하나 하나 따로 올리기위해서 입니다.

데스밸리는 

워낙에 광범위한 지역이기 때문에 뷰포인트마다 지명이나 호칭이 따로있습니다.

많은 지명을 이곳이 데스밸리다 라고 설명하기엔 무리가 있는듯 합니다.

그래서,

차근 차근 따로 설명하기 위해서는 

별도의 안내를 하는게 옳은듯 합니다.

오늘은 리료라이트 고스트 타운 입니다.

사업가인 Charles M. Schwab 는 1906년 이곳의 탄광인 Montgomery Shoshone Mine 을 구입하면서

본격적인 개발과 인프라 구축이 시작됩니다.

은행, 증권사, 마켙, 심지어 카지노까지 들어서고

마침내 기차역까지 들어서게 됩니다.

1907 년에 들서면서 전기, 수도,전화, 신문, 병원, 학교 그리고 오페라 하우스까지 ,,, 

그야말로 한개의 도시의 면모를 가춘 탄광촌으로 변모하게 됩니다.

그리하여 1907-1908년 사이에는 도시인구는 5000명에 육박하는 당시 캘리포니아에서는 가장큰 탄광촌으로 거듭나게 됩니다.

하지만,

1906년의 샌프란시스코의 지진,

1907년의 금융공황,

마침내 1908년의 투자자들에한 광산의 과대평가 여부를 조사하게 이릅니다.

1910년 광산은 적자로 돌아서는 운영을 하게 됩니다.

1911년 광산은 폐쇄되고 1920년에 도시 인구는 0, 유령도시가 됩니다.

Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region's biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.

Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure, including piped water, electric lines and railroad transportation, that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town's peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.

Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study's findings proved unfavorable, the company's stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite's population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.

After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were salvaged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.

The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through nearby Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]

"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5]

An ornate, two-story masonry building rests under a cloudless blue sky in a setting of gravel, two spiny trees, and many low shrubs. Its windows are boarded.

The town's former train station as it appeared in 2006

"Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district's other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6] The name persisted and, decades later, was given to the short-lived Bullfrog County.[7]

Beatty is named after "Old Man" Montillus (Montillion) Murray Beatty, a Civil War veteran and miner who bought a ranch along the Amargosa River just north of what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[8] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[9]

On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[24] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to $3,000 a ton,[25] or about $79,000 a ton in 2014 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[26] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[27]

Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[28] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as $16,000 a ton,[29] equivalent to $420,000 a ton in 2014.[26] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[28]

Bullfrog Miner, 1907

Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[30] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[31] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[32] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about $130,000,[33] equivalent to about $3,410,000 in 2014.[26] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[32]

By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[33] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada's Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[34] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[35] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[35]

Ruins of a three-story masonry building rise into a cloudless, dark blue sky. The building is roofless, and large sections of it walls are missing. Masonry rubble lies about the building, which has openings for doors and windows but no glass or wood. Another ruin is nearby, and barren hills are visible in the distance.

The Cook Bank Building in 1908 and 2009

Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, train station and railway depot, at least three banks, a stock exchange, an opera house, a public swimming pool and two formal church buildings. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than $90,000,[33] equivalent to $2,360,000 in 2014.[26] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices, and a post office, as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, and the two-story eight-room school. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[33] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[36]

Bust[edit]

Although the mine produced more than $1 million (equivalent to about $24 million in 2009)[26] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from $23 a share (in historical dollars) to less than $3.[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer's report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from $3 to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]

A roofless two-story masonry building rests in a setting of low shrubs and gravel under a cloudless blue sky. The building has many window openings but no glass. A mountain or hill is nearby, and a separate mountain range is visible in the distance.

The remains of Rhyolite's two-story, eight-room school building

Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California while interrupting rail service, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[35] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]

Much of Rhyolite's remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners' Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]

The Rhyolite historic townsite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44][45] is one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[46] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[47] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[48] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[49] Six-String Samurai (1998) was another movie using Rhyolite as a setting.[47] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is slightly south of Rhyolite.[50]

An abandoned wooden rail car rests on a bed of gravel. A large, rusting, cylindrical tank is nearby, among low bushes. Barren, striated hills can be seen in the distance. Lettering on the car says, "L.A. & SL" and "Union Pacific". A sign on the end of the car says, "Danger: Do Not Enter" and "Peligro: No Entre

A caboose formerly used as a gas station

Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose, a storage tank, and a pump, managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50] In 1984, Belgian artist Albert Szukalski created his sculpture The Last Supper on Golden Street near the Rhyolite railway depot.[53] The art became part of the Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park near the southern entrance to the ghost town.[54]