"RHYOLITE BOOM AND BUST" a Rhyolite Travel Page by mtncorg

Gold was the impetus for Rhyolite's short liefspan - basically 1905-1910. Big brick buildings were erected with a confident eye to the future. Train lines, newspapers, banks and six thousand people flocked here at the town's peak in 1908. The streets downtown boasted electric lights. By 1920, the town was empty. Recent years have seen an Australian gold mining firm spend a $100 million bringing in newer strip mining and cyanide processing techniques to comb over the old goldfields in a much more 'complete' fashion. You can wander about the old townsite which is preserved after a fashion under the guise of the BLM - Bureau of Land Management. Most travellers can make the short side trip to Rhyolite off the highway connecting Furnace Creek in Death Valley to US 95 in nearby Beatty.