Trip East - Death Valley, Day 2

Today the plan is to go to the Harmony Borax Works and then the Rhyolite Ghost Town.

First we have to move over to the parking lot down the road as there is nothing available at the campground

  

We had hoped to go to Scottys Castle but it is closed from storm damage.

Borax was the most profitable mining endeavor in Death Valley - White Gold.  Built in 1882 to refine the Borax here.  It was then transported 165 miles across the desert to the Train.

The remains of an original 20 Mule Team wagon train

Gary scopes out the trail they took

Next stop the Ghost Town.  The Train Depot was built in 1903 about the time Rhyolite was in decline.

an Old Caboose formerly used as a gas station

Remains of the Town

 The Cook Bank Building

and the Bottle House built by Local Tom Kelly.  Kelly collected 51,000 bottles from the 50 saloons in the area in fewer than six months to build his three-bedroom house complete with porch and trim. 

Approaching 80 years old, Kelly declined to live in the home he’d built, and instead capitalized on the hubbub. Upon its completion in February of 1906, Kelly raffled off the bottle house for $5 per ticket.   Kelly had paid local children 10 cents for a wheelbarrow full of bottles and ended up losing money on the venture

The bottle house's final tenants were Tommy Thompson and his eight children 

who lived there until 1969.   They built the little adjacent village

My favorite part was the free Open Air Museum and Art Exhibit

Tribute to Shorty Harris - legendary prospector with a pet penguin

Ghost Rider

Serving Ghost - donated in 2010 he was originally serving 4 wooden bottles that have disintegrated.  It is now seen as an artist's palette

The Last Supper

The Venus of Nevada and 1000 in 1 Cranes (referring to a Japanese Tradition of stringing together 1000 paper Cranes as a traditional gift at weddings and births)

Sit Here!

Icara

A fun side trip.  Will see what we see on the way back.

The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes.  Just a drive by as when you spend summers on Cape Cod and have seen White Sands and Great Sand Dune National Park, these are kind of ho hum.

Can't miss Badwater Basin - the lowest elevation in North America at 282 feet below sea level

 The salt flats here cover nearly 200 square miles, and are made up of mostly sodium chloride (table salt), with some calcite, gypsum, and borax.  You can walk out pretty far.

Spotted the sign up above (circled in blue)

Last but not least we do the Artist Point Loop on the way home

Someone was working on a Black Lab portrait

The roads twist and turn and go up and down like a roller coaster

The drive gets it's name from the palette of colors in the rocks

See the little Indian Boy coming out of his Teepee?

Another great day in Death Valley.  Did not get to see everything but it is a long drive to most of the points of interest and we only had so much time.  Would stay another day, but rain is predicted tomorrow so we have to get out of Dodge.

We met a lot of nice people.  People in the Parking Lot campground helped us with a tire going flat, the Hot Water heater and Generator.  RVers are a great group of people.