Rhyolite Ghost Town

The rush began in 1904, when prospectors Shorty Harris and E. L. Cross found quartz they described as full of free gold in the Bullfrog Hills. The strike set off a stampede, and Rhyolite grew with astonishing speed. At its peak around 1908 the town claimed thousands of residents and the trappings of a real city: concrete buildings, water and electric lines, three railroads, a hospital, an opera house, and a stock exchange.

It was a boomtown that believed in its own future, which is why its builders raised solid stone and concrete structures rather than quick wooden shacks. The three-story Cook Bank, faced in imported stone and fitted with fine woodwork, was the symbol of that confidence.

The confidence did not last. The main mine's ore proved less rich than hoped, and the national financial panic of 1907 choked off the investment that a boomtown needs to keep growing. Mines closed, the banks failed, and people began leaving almost as suddenly as they had arrived. By the early 1910s Rhyolite was nearly empty, and by the 1920s it was a ghost town.

The speed of the collapse is what makes Rhyolite so haunting. The grand buildings were barely finished before they were abandoned, and stripped over the years for materials, they weathered into the skeletal ruins that stand today. The Cook Bank, now roofless walls, is often called the most photographed ruin in Nevada.

The most charming survivor is the Tom Kelly Bottle House, built in 1906 from tens of thousands of glass bottles, medicine, beer, and whiskey, set in adobe mortar. In a treeless desert where lumber was expensive and empty saloon bottles were free, glass was simply a cheaper building material, and the result is a small, glittering house that has outlasted almost everything grander around it.

The Bottle House has been restored more than once, in part for films shot in the ghost town, and it remains one of the oldest and largest bottle houses in the country. It is a reminder that frontier ingenuity often meant building with whatever was cheap and at hand.

Rhyolite was never quite deserted, and a handful of caretakers still watch over it. The ruins are managed on public land, open and free to wander, and the low desert light at dawn and dusk turns the standing walls to gold, a favorite of photographers.

Right at the entrance stands the Goldwell Open Air Museum, a collection of large outdoor sculptures begun by Belgian artists in the 1980s, including a ghostly rendition of the Last Supper in white plaster figures. The pairing of a real ghost town with a field of ghostly art makes Rhyolite one of the most memorable stops on the road to Death Valley.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.