BACK to index

Day 3, we drove the 20 miles from Lee Vining to the mining ghost town of Bodie.  Famous for being a very rough place in its day. (65 saloons)   It was nearly 15,000 people at its peak and is credited with a few 1st in the world.  The first distance transmission of electricity was invented here (13 miles from a hydro plant) as well as the mining technique still used today to extract the gold from the ore, Cyanide leaching.

There's a story about a little girl whose family moved from San Francisco to Bodie. She wrote in her diary, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."

Gold was discovered here in 1859.  Now the whole town is a state historic park.

No one has lived here since the 1930's and many of the original buildings are gone from various fires over the last 80 years.  There are still 200 structures standing, however.

The day we visited Bodie, the church was open and very dusty inside.  Later we saw a wedding party taking wedding photos and the ceremony was to be in the old church (that last building to be restored in the 1930's)  The wedding party was wearing suits and dresses that would have been the look in the 1880s west.

Another 6 miles up Hwy 395 is the town of Bridgeport.  I wanted the kids to experience the truly natural mineral hot springs, not just the hot tub in our backyard.  A magazine article I had read listed 3-4 hot springs, and we choose this on just south of Bridgeport.

To get the best effects of the minerals you need to rub the mud on you.  It truly does make your skin feel very soft, but the main problem is that the mud is where you get the really bad rotten eggs smell.  They were willing to rub it on for the picture, but more mud baths did not happen.

One issue that can come up with these natural hot springs is that there is little regulation or enforcement so you never know what you can come across.  In the pool right next to where we were was the standard "naked fat guy" enjoying the day in the minerals.    

I have made Lori get her picture taken with many statues like this so I could not miss this opportunity when I spotted this in Bridgeport.  It reminded us of the painted bison all over the town of Avalon on Catalina Island when we visited there a couple years earlier.

From Bridgeport we drove back down Hwy 395,  30 miles to Lee Vining and spent some time at the formations at Mono Lake called Tufas.  Mono lake is one of the oldest lakes in the western hemisphere and has no outlet, just evaporation.  Mineral springs deposited their minerals to make these towers.  They can only be made underwater, so you can see at one time the lake was much higher.  The LA water district grabs much of the water before it gets to the lake.

The water is very salty and has high concentrations of carbonates (baking soda). This makes the water in Mono Lake very alkaline.  Mono Lake water feels and behaves a lot like soapy water.

Nearly half of the California Seagulls are hatched here.  The rest hatch at the Great Salt Lake.

BACK to index