Sarah and Michelle and I took a weekend to visit ghost-towns east of the sierras. We spent saturday leaving SF and getting to Bridgeport. We had a real nice drive, taking out time and stopping at every. single. garage-sale from the central valley to yosemite. We spent the night in this crazy decrepit hotel in bridgeport, and went on in the morning to Bodie. Bodie, it turns out, was once the third-largest city in california, and was pretty much the canonical boom-town. It burnt down in the late 1800s, so the buildings we saw were really only a vestige. At one time Bodie had 9 stamp-mills. The stamp-mills all ran on wood boilers. Bodie is above the tree-line at around 8400 feet, soo all the wood for the mills had to be brough in on narrow guage rail. Bodie consumed 300 cords of wood per day! We got to bodie pretty early and it was mostly empty but by noon there were quite a few cars in the lot. maybe 50. so we had lunch of peanut butter & jellies and went back down the dirt road to bridgeport, and took another, smaller and not-on-the-map dirt road to what we hoped would be the ghosttown of masonic. as it happened we didn't get to masonic but we did get to Chemung Mine. Then we went home. It was a super weekend. also, count the orions in this 360-degree panorama: as quicktime movie tiny image small image huge image

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michelle in the meadow, stereo 1/2	michelle in meadow stereo 2/2	stump stereo 1/2	stump stereo 2/2
a small abandoned cabin along the sonora pass	sarah	sarah in shack	orion in shack
rubble in shack	rubble in shack	very old mattress	michelle outside shack
shack window	sarah smells a rats	new foot and old mattress	orion on stump
orion still on stump	orion and stump	but lo! a nearby plant!	orion and plant
smells okay	you too must eat	no shortage of windows, these shacks	in a small wonky hotel in bridgeport
sarah	crazy sarah	crazy wallpaper	michelle dressing

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