After the Gold rush: Ghost towns of America's Southwest
California & Colorado revisited, Spring 2005
Fellow Foodies and Travellers,
Sabrina and I hope you enjoy this fourth edition of ‘revisited’.
Every so often we’re mining (pun intended) our memories of beloved travel destinations for additional material and the ghost towns of Bodie, in California and Dunton Hot Springs in Colorado have both left their mark on us.
Marco & Sabrina
While in no way as apocalyptic as the lyrics of Neil Young’s classic ‘After the Gold rush’, gold mining ghost towns are captivating ‘memento mori’ symbols which have always fascinated us and there’s no better place to experience them than in America’s Southwest.
The two that we’ll never forget are Bodie, which is not far from eerie Mono Lake on California’s Nevada border and Dunton Hot Springs, which is a couple of hours from Telluride, in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Both these erstwhile mining towns are hidden in remote valleys accessed by dirt roads. Both also share a more than colourful past. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s names are carved into the bar in Dunton’s saloon, as this is the place they hid out after a bank robbing spree in Telluride, while Bodie which had the richest seam in California’s gold rush, is said to have contained 65 saloons, numerous brothels and 'houses of ill repute', gambling halls, a Chinatown and opium dens, which served a population estimated at 10,000 in 1881, not much smaller than Los Angeles and Sacramento’s. Finally, both had their heyday in the 1890s.
Here the comparisons end, as today Bodie is a National Historic Landmark preserved in a state of suspended animation, (in part by the extreme cold and dryness of its high altitude location), as if the residents had just left town. You can peer through windows into cobwebbed saloons, livery stables, a gymnasium and a church where everything is just as it was, but under an ever-thickening layer of dust. On the day we visited the town was eerily deserted except for a lone figure perched on the stoop of one of the small cabins. Costumed docent or restless spirit? We’ll never know, but I was happy that he kept on staring at his shadow as I took his picture.
The much smaller mining camp of Dunton Hot Springs by contrast, has been ingeniously transformed into the most low-key, quirky luxury resort you’ll find anywhere, where the ‘rooms’ are the still rustic looking hand-hewn wooden buildings and cabins that made up the former settlement in the Colorado Rockies.
At its centre is the original 19th Century hot springs bathhouse, which no doubt soothed the aching bones of many an outlaw and Pinkerton in its day and which became the focal point of our stay in between hikes, (the mining camp is set in a stunningly beautiful valley), but as the forest’s bear population was waking up from its long hibernation we were warned not to walk too far. Long before the settlement was established, the Ute Indians roaming their summer hunting grounds, would no doubt have relaxed in the area’s restoring waters. The original spring is still visible at the highest point in town, but in order to make more use of the hot water the miners apparently dynamited the springs and directed their flow towards the bathhouse.
Luxurious it may be, but somehow the frontier spirit of old Dunton Gold Mining camp endures. I love the way this place represents a pre-nanny state America with no warning signs, a warm welcome but absolutely no concessions for kids and a robust disregard for protocol or hazard. That black snake dozing peacefully in the bathhouse for example is a fixture, not a reason to call Pest Control. Other buildings have been wittily re-purposed- you can practice yoga in the former Pony Express stop building or watch a DVD in the erstwhile Dance Hall.
Equally impressive is the food. When we stayed, there were only a couple of other guests, and Doug the chef who we got to know a little when he took us down to the corral to introduce us to his two horses, literally cooked our meals to order at whatever time we pleased. As is so often the case, the most remarkable dish we had there was also the most unpretentious, a Caramelized Onion and Red Pepper Soup.
Caramelized Onion and Red Pepper Soup: Serves Three
4 large red peppers, roasted in the oven, peeled and seeded
1 1/2 very large onions, sliced and caramelized; save some for the garnish
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup heavy cream
Place the peppers and onions in a food processor, process until smooth. Pour into a saucepan; add the chicken stock and the cream, season to taste and heat until just starting to boil.
Serve with a dollop of sour cream and a few caramelized onions.
The day we left Dunton we had one of those nightmare road trip sequences of events, with a flat tyre on a dirt road, a rainstorm soaking us to the skin as we re-loaded the car having changed the wheel and several missed turn offs adding hours to our journey. Doug’s kind but misguided parting words “you guys are awesome- if I had a family, I’d want them to be like you”, were ringing in my ears as we were having a loud and completely pointless family argument over these various mishaps.
As a postscript, just last week we visited Ballarat, one of Australia’s former gold rush towns and famed back in the day for the discovery at the Redhill Mine of the world’s second largest gold nugget. To keep the memory of the state of Victoria’s gold rush alive they have built Sovereign Hill, a replica of the former 1850s township, complete with working goldmine, smelting works and all the other paraphernalia of prospecting life and the businesses associated with it from picks, shovels and gold panning equipment to a Main Street of apothecaries, stables, hotel, drapers, wheelwrights and blacksmiths which are operated by the town’s ‘inhabitants’ in period dress. Much more than costumed docents, these individuals run their businesses for profit and you get a real sense of their enthusiasm and commitment to verisimilitude as you engage and observe. That group of young women gossiping as they crowd around the Post Office window couldn’t have been staged and while the detachment of redcoats marching up Main St gamely posed for selfies after firing a volley of muskets (blanks of course) they certainly looked like they meant business.
Cheesy for sure, but heartfelt for all that and having entered as cynics and paid a ticket price that a major Paris museum wouldn’t sniff at, we left there as converts.
Disneyland could learn a lesson or two from these Aussie country towners.
Another evocative trip into the fractured heart of the American Dream. Marco's wonderful way with words conjures up as many images as Neil Young's After The Gold Rush, though Young's vision is more impressionistic and, well, stoned. The article was also a timely reminder of all those hidden gems in the US, as I discovered last year when I spent a couple of days on the edge of the Joshua Tree Desert in California, retracing the last hours of the one and only Gram Parsons. Unforgettable.
This feels so timely as I just returned from the desert (the Mojave). Also, that bath house looks incredible!! 🛁