Rhyolite: Five Thousand People, Seven Years, Gone

Just across the Nevada state line from Death Valley Junction, at the end of a dirt road through the Bullfrog Hills, the stone walls of Rhyolite stand against the sky in various states of not-quite-collapse. The bank building. The train depot. The bottle house, built by a miner named Tom Kelly from approximately fifty thousand discarded beer and medicine bottles, the glass now frosted by a century of desert sun.

In nineteen oh-four, a gold strike at the Bullfrog Mine set off a rush that brought five thousand people to this hillside within a few years. Three competing newspapers. A stock exchange. Electric lights. A railroad that arrived in nineteen oh six and was gone, its tracks pulled up for scrap, by nineteen fourteen. At its peak, Rhyolite had the infrastructure of a genuine small city, built on the assumption that the ore would last.

The ore did not last. The Bullfrog Mine's gold body played out faster than anyone had modeled. Investment dried up. Banks closed. By nineteen twelve, Rhyolite was a ghost town in the textbook sense: the buildings still standing, the infrastructure still technically in place, the population gone.

What replaced the gold economy at Rhyolite was an art economy, which is a much stranger thing. In nineteen eighty-four, a Belgian sculptor named Albert Szukalski arrived at the ruins and installed a life-size plaster-wrapped human figure among the stones. It was the first piece of what became the Goldwell Open Air Museum, a private nonprofit that has added large-scale outdoor sculptures to the townsite over the following decades.

The Bureau of Land Management maintains the ghost town ruins. The Goldwell Museum maintains the sculptures. The relationship between them is unusual: a federal ghost town that is simultaneously an outdoor contemporary art venue, in the Nevada desert, twelve miles from the California border.

The full arc from mining boomtown to open-air sculpture park took less than eighty years. The Mojave works quickly.