SavocaWeb

by Ben Savoca

Las Vegas – May 2009

The famous neon of Glitter Gulch, on the Fulmont Street Experience

A friend of mine recently moved from San Francisco back to her home town of Las Vegas, NV. She was upset that whenever any friends visited, all they wanted was to drink and gamble. ”Fine,” I told her. ”I’m flying out there for a weekend, and you can show me the Nevada that you grew up in.”

The first night we hit the Strip, not to gamble, but to people watch. The lights, the sounds, and everything else were overwhelming, and everywhere people were caught up in the heady illusion of instant gratification without apparent consequence (the next morning, of course, would be different).

The next day we drove two hours north to Beatty, which is five miles west of the ghost town Rhyolite. Between 1905 and 1911, the gold-rush town grew to a population of 5,000 and then dropped to nothing. Financed largely by Charles Schwab, the town in its heyday was highly advanced and sophisticated. Now, all that stands are a few empty shells of buildings.

The gold dried up in Rhyolite, but its sister town, Beatty, proved to have a much more abundant, important, and reliable resource: water. Beatty provided the water for the gold mining town, and when Rhyolite blew away on the sands of time, Beatty stuck around. It’s still a lonely little town, but it’s full of incredible characters.

A ghost in Rhyolite

Stuck in Beatty with not much to do, we hit the town’s three bars, which had all sorts of locals who welcomed us with arms wide open. They were a trip and a half, and we made some memories that won’t soon be forgotten: climbing into an abandoned basement church, wearing a viking helmet, and the urinal whose flushing mechanism was the brake lever of wall-mounted motorcycle handlebars.