Once California's most notorious town and a byword for wickedness, Bodie is now preserved in a state of 'arrested decay', writes ELGY GILLESPIE
WE'VE HEARD how all nuts tend to roll towards California, and there's something in that: gold, frontier towns, earthquakes, fault lines, homeless vets. An Irish friend of mine likes it here, because he says it's possible to be eccentric without hassle on the Left Coast. It's tolerant.
But among the sunshine state's oddities is the spooky Gold Rush ghost town of Bodie, where in its heyday nuttiness "blossomed untrimmed, and thoughtlessly", as he says.
Ah, Bodie! In its day, California's largest and most notorious ghost town was a byword for wickedness, not so much romantic as haunted. When a miner's little daughter wrote, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie!" in her diary back in the 1870s, it was soon "revised" by locals into "Good! By God, I'm going to Bodie!"
Near the now-bustling ski resorts around Mammoth Lakes, Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe, Bodie is currently the coldest spot in the state at minus 3 degrees. It's also near a necklace of volcanic hot springs sprinkled along Route 395 in the Eastern Sierras, east of Yosemite.
Overnight, Bodie gained its reputation for lawlessness, murders, lynching, gambling, prostitution, and general godlessness. No passing stagecoach was safe. Entertainment featured whoring and nightly fights in its 65 saloons.
Soon, Bodie was more famous for wickedness than gold. Its fire bell rang long and loud for murder victims, tolling out their ages at time of death. By 1881, Reverend F M Warrington was calling it "a sea of sin, lashed by the tempest of lust and passion". Best known of its inhabitants was the "Badman from Bodie", whose real name was either Tom Adams or "Washoe Pete".
But by the 1880s, the mines were used up and it was soon hard to believe 10,000 people once lived here. A ghost town by the mid-20th century, Bodie is preserved in a state of "arrested decay", with stores kept just as they were and stocked, and has been a state historic park since 1962.
Tales of phantom faces at the windows of its long-vacant hotel linger on. A Chinese woman haunts one, also the ghost of Rosa Mae, a whore with a heart of gold who nursed sick miners back to health. Poor Rosa Mae came to a bad end and was buried in the sinners' cemetery, and presumably remains unhappy about her fate.
Visitors making the lonesome trek from Highway 395 along the Eastern Sierras find empty saloons, deserted stores, a tiny museum, and howling winds amid the vast, barren landscape. An hour behind you is Lee Vining, and the best diner in the West, Twomey's. Eat up. Oh, and gas up too – you'll find no cafe or pump in Bodie, not even water. At this time of year it's six metres under snow and only reachable on skis – a man died in last winter's blizzards. Oh, and Highway 120 through Yosemite is snowed in till spring.
BUT ON THE western side of the Sierras, a string of still-picturesque mining towns twinkle along Route 49, commemorating spots where the young writer Mark Twain wrote humorously and intimately about colourful Wild West characters.
Murphys, Columbia, and Angel's Camp look as romantic as they did in 1864 and 1865, when the creator of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer spent his cub reporting days in the "Motherlode", stuffing notebooks with tall stories such as his first smash hit, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. (By the way, the all-time champion in contests was Rosie the Ribbiter at 26 feet.)
Twain's lost day in the sun is back again and brighter than ever. The great populist spent 35 years dictating his autobiography to a typist (the world's first, he claimed), then embargoed it for publication a hundred years after his death in 2010. He did that knowing his victims couldn't sue.
Angel's Camp and Twain Motherlode Museum recently threw a book bash for Twain's newest and frankest memoirs. And they are frank: affairs and progressive views that would be shocking for their times, and are still surprising. His humble cabin remains with its plaque. His satirical jabs continue to entertain and to skewer.
Where to stay
Bodie and Mono Lake
Double Eagle Resort (00-1-760-648-7004, doubleeagle.com) at June Lakes near Lee Vining and Mono Lake has camping and chalets, a huge pool and spa, plus quirky fly fishing pool and restaurant, even yoga in the mountains, and is fishing heaven (locals recommended garlic as bait!).
Highway 395’s motels are 14 miles east of Yosemite and near all the ski resorts of Mammoth Lakes and Tahoe (NB H-120 is snowed in till April or May). Murphey’s (00-1-800-334-6316, murpheysyosemite.com) is cosy and not overpriced. Doubles start at $53 (€40) including breakfast.
Travertine Springs, Jack Sawyer Road near Bridgeport, H-395 is free to use, with amazing views and 40-degree water, and yes, wear nada or combinations, up to you.
Buckeye Hot Spring in Toiyabe National Forest near Bridgeport next to a cave off Twin Lakes Road offers free camping.
Further south, Hot Lake in Mammoth Lakes is not the hearty-party spot it was back in the 1970s – sudden boiling geysers have put it off limits.
For more information on hot springs, see gonomad.com/ destinations/0409/hot_ springs_of_the_sierras.html
The Gold Country
A string of well-preserved Victorian hotels adorn Highway 49 north and south of I-80. The 1856 City Hotel (22768 Main Street, Columbia, 00-1-209-532-1479) in Columbia State History Park houses the What Cheer Saloon. Rooms from $75 (€57).
The 1879 Imperial Hotel (14202 Highway 49, Amador City, 00-1-209-267-9172) is small but opulent. Rooms from $64 (€49).
Nevada City’s 1856 National Hotel (211 Broad Street, Nevada City, 00-1-916-265-4551) is where Twain drank and Irish-born Lola Montez debuted her famous “spider dance” and claims to be the West’s oldest. Rooms from $68 (€52).
Jamestown Hotel (18153 Main Street, Jamestown, 00-1-209-984-3902, jamestownhotel.com) is perhaps the most picture-perfect. Rooms from $65 (€49).
I confess to a soft spot for Sutter Creek Inn (Main Street off Highway 49, at Sutter Creek, 00-1-209-267-5606, suttercreekinn.com), a sprawl of cosy rooms and patios.
St George Hotel (16104 Main Street in Volcano, 00-1-209-296-4458) is another well-kept gem in a fascinating town.
Where to eat
Try Matt Toomey’s Gas Mart on Highway 395 in Lee Vining, on the north side of Mono Lake, for fish tacos and local wines from Amador County. Highway 49 dining can be fine, especially in the historic hotels.
What to see
Sagebrush, sweet-scented Jeffrey pines, dead volcanoes, tufa towers, gulls, grebes, brine shrimp, alkali flies in Mono, freshwater streams, and pines make up the unlikely landscape of Highway 395 between the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Great Basin Desert. Pronghorn antelope graze in the Bodie Hills, yellow-bellied Marmots bask in the Sierras, Great Basin spadefoot toads, and more.
If you’re freezing, Scotties Castle south of Bishop (a bizarre folly), Zabriskie Point, Armargosa Opera House, and desert dunes of Death Valley are your options at the southern tip of Highway 395 – another world in the middle of nowhere and also breathtaking.
Ever the Twain... the 'Dead Sea of California'
CLAP YOUR EYES on the lunar landscape of Mono Lake, and you’ll see why it was renamed “the Dead Sea of California” by the ever-popular Mark Twain.
Mono’s briny waters are alkaline-grey, hyper-saline and buzzing with mutant flies. They are biologically unique.
Twain, currently celebrating his centenary and associated with the Gold Country, swore he could dip his pants in Mono Lake and whisk them out again spanking clean without need of scrubbing.
He also claimed that Mono’s Alkali flies were impervious to water. “You can hold them underwater as long as you please – they do not mind it, they are only proud of it!” he declared in Roughing It, his account of his adventures in the Wild West.
What Twain never predicted was finding record levels of arsenic-loving microbes in Mono Lake’s unusual bacteria. Biologists at Nasa have just announced a new form of Mono bacteria that flourish by absorbing arsenic rather than phosphorus, possibly even in nucleic “genes”.
The newly-discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, belongs to the Gammaproteobacteria.
Half-drained decades ago by the city of Los Angeles to provide water, Mono’s concentrated salinity formed its salty cratered moonscape (the name probably comes from a Yokut Indian word for “fly-eater”) and its unusual ecosystem draws many breeds of rare migrating birds such as grebes and phalaropes.
The life forms that survive at Mono Lake have adapted themselves to high arsenic levels.
These findings don’t rewrite the book of life, but they do underscore the flexibility of evolution by natural selection, while expanding the horizons of what we might expect to find on other planets, claim Nasa scientists.
“We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new – building parts of itself out of arsenic,” said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a Nasa astrobiology research fellow at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, and the team’s lead scientist.
“If something on earth can do something this unexpected, what else can life do that we haven’t seen yet?” she asks.
Getting there
Getting to Bodie between September and May means a 20km slog on a snowmobile, tractor or skis through snowbound hills. So wait till spring! But you can ski in Mammoth Lakes or Lake Tahoe (Route 120 closes in winter. Highway 108 may need chains. Highway 49 is all-weather and so is Interstate 80; check roads ahead by calling 511.)
Aer Lingus (aerlingus.com) flies to Los Angeles, from where you can drive I-10 to Highway 395, one of the most dramatic roads in the US.
California hits the Twain Motherlode again!