the unstoppable red baron

as ‘relaxing’ as ghost town hunting sounds, it really can be stressful. for one thing, most ghost towns aren’t really ghost towns, but 98% ghost town and 2% home for eccentrics, outlaws, meth heads, and crazy old men who want to know why you are snooping around taking pictures. the other reason, as exemplified in the above video, is that a lot of ghost towns are at the end of what are essentially ghost roads, and while my trusty war pony mini van has proven it’s tenacious unstoppableness time and time again, i still get worried that some day i am going to get stuck out in the middle of nowhere. i mean, in the video above, we are about 20 miles from the nearest town and on a road so skinny that we really couldn’t have turned around even if we wanted to. we were on bodie road right at the california / nevada boarder in search of an abandoned town called aurora. one hundred years ago there used to be the giant del monte mill right at the site where the road is washed out, but today there isn’t much left.
all of these ghost town roads are pretty much the same- they ever so slowly get worse, luring you further and further away from civilization, tempting you to go a little bit deeper until you get to the point where turning around becomes a moral dilemma. nobody wants to give up and be the one who turned around just before the prize was obtained. yet nobody wants to get stuck out in the desert and have to hike for two days to find a tow truck driver and explain to him that you really thought your mini-van would be able to make it over the pile of boulders in the washed out road. it really is stressful. so much so that after a day of ghost town hunting you feel like you need a massage and a vacation. but as they say, the journey is the destination, and every once in a while you get lucky: