Having left Reno, and more than a hundred miles away, I realized that I could have visited the famous Mustang Ranch brothel. I must be a happily married man to be so forgetful about details like that. The ranch seems to have visiting hours for tourists I read somewhere. The nearby cemetery would have also been worth a visit, since the buried working girls of the past seem to have bedposts as markers. The suite in the ranch goes for 10s of thousands of dollars a night, but it seems for that price, to see little action, although the story goes every year a few girls get the opportunity to share a 50 percent take from the use of the suite. It would have been fun to tour the place with Sandee guided by a working girl. I hope if my readers have the chance one day they will tell me all about it. I am particularly interested in the ticket price.
We travelled on our way to our next national park, Zion, over the seemingly second loneliest road in Nevada, highway 6.
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| This picture tells the "lonely" story |
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| We could have slept here wonder about the room decor |
We aimed for a place called Tonopah, an old mining town, with today as its claim to fame an old grand lady hotel the "Mizpah". We should have stayed there instead of in the Best Western, especially since they had smoking rooms and had put us in one - Sandee was ready to sleep in the car if I couldn't get that issue resolved - but just like the Mustang Ranch I did not get my act together timely and I read about the famous hotel when we were only several hours away. So all we could do is eat there.
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| The lounge across the street was less refined |
Tonopah, calling itself queen of the silver mines, was a large mining town in its heydays, with curbs, gutters, street lights, municipal water and telephone and telegraph services, with a stock exchange office, several banks, brothels a newspapers and a railroad. Records show more than 30,000 citizens and the Mizpah hotel had in 1907 the only elevator between San Francisco and Denver. The city started declining in the 1920's. Nowadays the town of 2500 citizens relies on the military and the passing through of people visiting the 100 plus acres historic mining park telling the story of Jim Butler and his wife Belle.
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| Belle Butler's Mizpah mine |
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| Jim Butler's original mine |
As the story goes Jim Butler in 1900 was corralling his wayward burros and picked up a stone to throw at them, discovering that the seemingly heavy stone was laced with silver. Being a rather lazy guy it was his wife Belle who forced him to steak his claims. And it was she that found the richest lode of the bunch the Mizpah mine. It was his laziness that brought the town to great wealth because he allowed, on the strength of a handshake, prospectors to mine his claims for a 20 percent pay out of their daily production. Thousands of them flocked to the mines and developed his and Belle's claims for years, till he sold his claims to a large corporation in 1904 and retired to California.
Tonopah, put Nevada's finances back in order and fielded senators to DC. Wyatt Earp and his wive Josie moved here from Tombstone and was here both saloon owner, prospector and sheriff, before retiring to California.
NA grandmother of the present Mizpah Hotel owners lived here with her brother, a prospector, and that is the reason the present owners (who also have a winery in the Napa Valley) bought, in her memory, the run down hotel and brought it back to its original glory. The story of her grandmother Emma, who became postmaster in nearby Goldfield, and Nancy Cline, the granddaughter story features on the back of the menu. I urge all of you to visit the Mizpah and read it.
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| The Mizpah lounge |
The federal government has a top secret area 50 base here, testing new developments in military airplane stuff. It neighbors the famous UFO Area 51. (As I type the word "Area 51", spell check brings it up before I can finish typing, showing me how famous this area is). But more on this later.
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| The famous Nasa training crater |
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| Another Moon shot |
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| A fire pit on the Moon? |
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| Did the astronauts leave a camping memento |
The next day we visited the Lunar Crater area, where NASA had its first astronauts train because the area seemed to resemble the moon. It was here that Sandee "caught" the first of two birds in Hansie's grill that he has "collected" so far. My "husband" duty was to remove the remains. She also holds the record in road kill, those fast little buggers, the chipmunks, that seem to test her wherever we go travel in the west. (see footnote *)
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| Rachel town humor? |
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| To make sure UFO seekers find the place |
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| Our stop over for coffee and pie |
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| A UFO decorated bar ceiling - the departed? |
The last stop before reaching our destination for the night was having coffee and pie in a must do stopover, headquarters for the UFO crowd, the "A Le Inn" in the center of Area 51, Rachel Nevada. The 50 plus inhabitants of Rachel, named after the first baby born here, are apt to tell tales of UFO's and aliens to eager visitors, that will shame many a fisherman into revisiting his grand tales of catches.
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| Left behind? |
* Sandee claims the above unfair, as she does 75% of the driving and thus has a disproportionate chance of hitting something.
PS to Vivian and Brenda, who competed for the right answer to my question:
"What are the oldest living species on earth?", many an answer could be right because my question was flawed. First I pluralized the question, when actually I intended to ask for a single species, excluding clonal colonies such as aspen trees or coral reefs who can live as a rooted colony seemingly forever or bacterial spores that re-metabolize again and again. All these types of living specimen are really only guesstimated by scientists. Also my question could have been interpreted to ask for animals or plant families that have been on earth the longest. Luckily my two contestants understood my "English" correctly. And the winner is: ..... Drumroll, "Brenda almost right". The oldest individual species on earth found todate and certified as such is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine with a ring count making it 5067 years old this year and counting. Funny enough it's birthday is not the date of the first time it breached the surface eons ago, but the day he was measured and named January 8. His given name is "Oldlist".
When researching this I found that the oldest certified human was "of course" female and "unfortunately" French, born in Arles where she died in 1997, having lived for 122 years and 164 days. Jeanne Calment met Van Gogh at the age of 13, and found the Dutchman "dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable". I consider that, for a French person, a very apt description (with exception of dirty, something French people, who hardly ever use deodorant should consider claiming - but I digress) of the Dutch - a nationality I proudly claim.
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