ThrillRide! Special Features

The next day, we went South to Bodie. There's an exit off of State Highway 395, and then a 13-mile drive over unpaved road into the middle of nowhere. 'Round a turn, and this is the view out windshield:

Breathtaking. According to the park literature, only 5% of the town's original structures still survive.

Designated as a state historic park in 1962, Bodie is now preserved in a state of "arrested decay."

Again, according to park literature, in 1879, about 10,000 people lived here.

A good number of those people were pretty awful, apparently: "Killings occurred with monotonous regularity."

Upon learning that her family was moving to this infamous town, one poor little girl wrote in her diary, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie."

But the Methodist Church survives.

"The Reverend F. M Warrington saw [Bodie] in 1881 as 'a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion.' "