Second visit, three years after the first, and the difference is grim. Water has got into the upper floor and taken the ceiling with it. Whatever you were planning to photograph here, do it now or don't bother.
Main Street in timber, with the Standard Mill on the hill above.
Abandoned✓ VERIFIED
Bodie
A gold town held in 'arrested decay'
Region
California, United States
Coordinates
38.2124, -119.0126
Access
Open access
Risk
Trivial
262
The record
A boomtown of nearly 8,000 after the 1876 gold strike. Decline was steady from the 1880s; the last residents left in the 1940s. Now a State Historic Park maintained in arrested decay — stabilised but never restored.
The oracle
sign in to retell
The approach gives nothing away. Bodie does not announce itself. What registers first is scale — the structure is larger inside than the approach prepares you for, and colder.
Paint has come off the walls in sheets, curled like bark. The known history covers perhaps two thirds of what you are standing in. Beyond that the record thins into municipal paperwork and hearsay, and then into nothing at all.
The last maintenance log is dated three weeks after the site was recorded as closed. At danger level 1 of 5, the honest advice is that the place deserves more caution than curiosity usually allows.
Site reconstruction
Walk inside Bodie
You arrive outside. Orbit the site, fly over it or walk the grounds, then go in — four fragments of this site's record are scattered through the structure, and your torch runs down the whole time.
ENTER THE SITE →orbit · fly · walk, then inside · sign in to keep the record
Generated from this site's record — a abandoned of its scale and condition. Its character, not its surveyed floor plan.
Field reports · 1
Written by people who actually went. Where these contradict the oracle, believe these.
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Discussion · 3
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Whoever wrote this dossier has clearly been. The hazard list is exactly right.
Been on my list for six years. Every time I get close, the weather turns.
The 1963 date is off by a year in most sources. The municipal record says otherwise, I can dig out the reference.