With my next trip to the Eastern Sierra just a few days away, I’ve been going through older images from the area. While not a place that we’ll be taking workshop folks to, [wikipop]Bodie, California[/wikipop] is an interesting side trip.

Bodie, like many towns in the Sierra, sprang up in 1859 after gold was discovered. Over the years, it’s estimated that over 34 million dollars in gold was extracted from the mines in the area. While a hand full of residents remained into the 1960s, most of the gold had dried up and folks moved on a decade or two after the turn of the 20th century.  In the late 1060s, Bodie became part of the California State park system.

What makes Bodie interesting is that it just looks like everyone “got up and left.” There glass still sitting on tables, merchandise in the store window and billiard balls still out on their table. It really is the epitome of a ghost town.

The only way in to Bodie is via a section of graded, but unpaved, road that becomes impassable during bad weather.  It spends much of the winter buried in snow, accounting for much of the preservation. The blanket of snow and ice protects it from the harsh Sierra winter.

This image was taken a couple of years ago, during the same trip as the Mono lake image in my previous post. There were some nice high clouds filtering the light and it was only an hour before sunset. The lowness of the sun in the sky was giving everything a nice warm glow. To capture the image I used my Canon 24-70 f/2.8L at 25mm. To get enough depth of field to keep the whole scene in focus I chose f / 11 which gave me a shutter speed of 1/30th at ISO 100.

Cheers