Rhyolite Ghost Town - Comparing Then and Now - I Found the Mines!

so i've made it to the western side of nevada i pretty much drove all the way through really my first stop is uh this semi-preserved ghost down here called rhyolite an old like 1905 boom town gold ore i guess at one time this was a this was a big town they claimed something like 6 000 residents the boom years were between 1905 and 1911. by 1920 this place was a literal ghost town and it was dead because the i guess the mines dried up but in its uh glory had 18 grocery stores 50 saloons 19 lodging houses six barbers four bakeries 35 gaming tables eight doctors and three railroads interestingly enough during a tie day the lack of local timber supplies led to concrete and adobe being used for most buildings and even three buildings being built from empty glass bottles if you know me at all then you know that i like to when possible i like to compare what things look like back in the day to now so i have a lot of the old pictures of you know back from the early early 1900s so it's gonna be a lot of fun to compare those i couldn't help but notice that this is pretty much the same exact spot where someone took photos from 1908 really puts it into perspective you know over a hundred years later this is what it looks like so this is what is left of the cook building it was the tallest building in rhyolite which makes it very easy to spot in those photos from up on top of the mountain and this was most likely the main bank in rio light not the only one look at this you can see the original vaults look like you had two of them i'm not sure when this was built but it had electric lights and indoor plumbing and it was apparently beautifully decorated with marble floors and mahogany woodwork it looks like this was one of the only buildings that had what looks like a basement as well well as usual these small little videos often turn into big adventures um when most people come here they stay on this one main road and they you know get out take some pictures whatever and get back in the car and keep on going but there are these dirt roads that you can walk down and they show a lot of different old ruins and things like that so i was walking down here and i just realized that like i was saying before the mines are probably in the hills you can see them uh right in the center of screen that's one you can see a little trail going up to one and then that trail continues all the way up looks like there's at least three so i'm sure they're blocked off but uh i'm gonna hike up there anyway because i'd be crazy not to before i get to the to the mine up there i want to show you this door look at this this must have been a jail or a bank or something this is a steel door how cool is that man this thing is going to survive the end of time welded shut let's see what it looks like on the other side oh there's a cell in there it was a jail how cool is that i don't know if you guys can see in there not i can't at all i wonder how long it's been since someone's been in there all right we're going to continue on our way over to the mine here that other ones the other two are way up there so we'll see how we see how i feel i always end up climbing really steep things i don't expect to all right here you go yeah it's blocked off but you can still go in a decent decent distance look at that that goes back really far obviously let me see i don't think this yeah it's got a padlock on it and everything but i'm sure this mine has been gone through i don't know if you're gonna find anything in this this was basically a a ghost town by 19 by the teens but certainly by 1920 um once these you know like any of these mining towns once the once the mines dry up once they're not producing anymore it doesn't take long and then these these places are you know they're done they're gone all right on our way up here there were actually a lot of different holes here all along down this other side look at this the shaft they're all the way up the hill the last one i'm going to go to is right here though it's weird you want to keep going because you never know what that next one might be it might be that might be the amazing one you know like i said you never know looks like i nailed it this has no gate no fence blocking it off and it's a lot cooler let me see i got a light on my phone it's flashing on my phone is doing next to nothing looks like there was an attempt there to dig some more look at this kind of cool you can see kind of how it was done oh yeah all different types of ways to go but i don't have a light i did not think i was going to be uh going in mines today so see what's over here oh it's as far as it goes and then that's one of those shafts i think i've been seeing ventilation all in all this goes in maybe 40 or 50 feet maybe a little bit more 60 feet oh this does go back further actually oh this only goes back to here you know what never mind what's crazy is it um just they just kind of followed the earth i guess just digging around in circles that explains why there's so many um so many air vents i'm assuming that's what they are that i've been seeing because these things go all different ways all right i'm going to go back down i really want to see that train station that depot this one fly has been following me for like a half a mile what is this event or is this where the uh this is a shaft for that mine all you mine experts will have to tell me what do you think maybe an old jail is it possible and it's got the bars on the windows so you would think uh this could have been just a makeshift gel this is what's left of the general store the porter brothers had multiple stores before coming to rhyolite and in this place they sold pretty much everything except for alcohol but mostly mining supplies house supplies and food i believe this opened in 1902 so it was pretty early for this area but by 1910 it was it was closed down so this building was also a bank this is the overbury building also the bishop jewelry store was in here there's not too much information about this but it was built in 1907 and this building also had electric and indoor plumbing and you can see as you walk in here look at this this is also the the bank vault the bank vault from oh yeah it's gotta it had to have been what else could this be it's too small to be even an office it's only about maybe seven feet by nine feet something like that i bet you that's what this was it's just how it's standing in the middle of a bank like or in the middle of the building like this again there's not much information at least posted here might be more stuff online but this is really the the jewel of this area now it's completely fenced in for obvious reasons they don't want people trekking around on this thing but it seems to be in great shape look at that whole the porch wraps around it release most of it a popular misconception is that this building never had any tracks which is it's definitely not true in fact here are some photos of the train tracks sitting right out in front of this and it's actually pretty well documented that the las vegas and tonopah railroad started coming through rhyolite around sometime in late 1906. at some point i think in the 1930s this building was reused as a casino and a bar which is why the sign up there says casino i don't know how long it was used as a casino but probably for some time and then years later a couple moved into this building and it also housed a museum for the area look at this look at this train car you got to see inside there man this thing is old that is cool flies out here are in love with me look at the floor love this i mean obviously people just jump this fence and go in there but i don't need to you can pretty much see what it looks like now this building is one of two schools i don't know what the name of this was but um at one time the school had over 200 students it was built in 1909 and it was the second one built like i said i couldn't find much info on this there are some pictures though so i'll include the pictures of it so this is the famous bottle house the only one left of three that were originally in rhyolite it was built in 1906 by a man named tom kelly a simple three-room house i believe it's a museum these days but as my luck would have it it's closed today i'm driving out to the cemetery there's just a little wooden sign that says cemetery to the left and i'm on this shaky dirt road i don't know where the cemetery is but if you can see the dirt road goes straight for miles and miles and miles i mean look at that goes all the way up into the into the mountains that's who knows how far that is 10 miles away something like that there's a car way up there that's probably maybe a mile or two up ahead of me i don't know where this cemetery is i hope it's not that far all right i finally made it to the cemetery it's not that far it's just you know it's slow going because it's a dirt road but the town the ghost town is back there you can kind of see it this is certainly not like a typical cemetery that you would be used to seeing look at that a wooden a wooden tombstone let's see if i can see if i can read any of these things [Applause] one mrs ann sisk died 1908 not to put out any grim or dark thoughts but i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these have been grave robbed over the years i mean you could think about how ignored this area must have been in the 1930s and 40s and 50s you know nobody cared i'm sure there was no preservation and if you think it's rural and out there now you can imagine what it was like 60 70 years ago here just you and the rattlesnakes and some burrows james c clayton died 1905 1866 to 1905. there's a couple other ones this is another one 1905 died at bullfrog nevada may 4th looks like 1906. daniel g kennedy you know a lot of these guys are people at least to men i'm sure we're mine is crazy to think about maybe died in the mine i don't know why i just i love the the wooden tombstone i love that my guess is there was a lot more to this at some point this cemetery probably looked very different a hundred years ago and bullfrog rail light cemetery so i guess the town of bullfrog wasn't too far away 1904 to 1912. um this plaque was says april 1959 so maybe i'm mistaken maybe maybe this was being cared for all along maybe this is typical of a uh of a cemetery out here i don't know the only one i've seen all right thanks for watching i'm going to continue on in nevada see in the next video

Channel: Mobile Instinct

Views: 126,110

Rating: 4.9637098 out of 5

Keywords: rhyolite ghost town, where is rhyolite, haunted places in nevada, ghost towns in america, cool ghost towns, mobile instinct, atlast obscura rhyolite, mobile instinct ghost town

Id: w8IBOcq95vc

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 14 2020