California and the West : CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Bodie Offers Rough Sketch of Life in the Wild West : The past is present in a Gold Rush ghost town that, with the meticulous assistance of the state parks department, recalls the hardships of a rugged era.

This has always been a desolate place, its hardships fittingly summed up by the 11-year-old girl moving here in 1879 who wrote in her diary, “Goodbye, God. I’m going to Bodie.”

Awaiting her, she knew, were high winds and hard winters. Nightly, bad hombres picked gunfights in Main Street bars and the brothels along Virgin Alley. By day, miners in the gold and silver ore mill overlooking town swung sledgehammers in 12-hour shifts until the work turned them into old men by 35.

Bleak as life was then, that young diarist would find Bodie even more desolate today. Nestled between sage-covered slopes of the eastern Sierra just north of Mono Lake, Bodie is a ghost town now, what’s left of it. Fires in 1892 and 1932 reduced 95% of its buildings to ash.

Yet, despite the past misfortunes, Bodie has survived as a California state park, its remnants of a rowdy past so authentically maintained that historians have called Bodie one of the nation’s best-preserved examples of an Old West mining town.

To keep it that way, even in recent years when money was scarce and conditions deteriorated at other state parks, officials in Sacramento have made protecting Bodie a priority.

Over the last five years, the state has spent more than $300,000 annually at Bodie State Historic Park to halt the ravages of time and fierce weather.

True to its origins, though, Bodie is short on creature comforts for the 200,000 visitors who come each year.

The 1,100-acre park has no snack bars and the water system, clogged with dirt, is out of order. Picnic tables are half a mile from the edge of town. No overnight camping is permitted, and there isn’t a tree to pitch a tent under.

During winter, the 8,400-foot-elevation park remains open with a ranger on duty, but to get there travelers often must brave 100-mph winds and negotiate roads buried in 14-foot snowdrifts.

When the weather is good, it’s worth the trip, said Lynn Casper, a frequent visitor who lives in nearby June Lake. “You can visualize the Western past, the Gold Rush, the women in long dresses, Chinatown, the saloon shootings,” she said. “It’s wonderful, but can you imagine living here in the winter?”

In any season, the lack of amenities is by design, said Brad Sturdivant, Bodie’s chief ranger.

“People should appreciate the hardships of just getting to a place like this,” he said. Accordingly, the last leg of the journey to Bodie, after turning east off U.S. 395, crosses 13 crooked miles, the last three left deliberately unpaved.

Upon arrival, visitors walk through dirt streets and simple pine-plank buildings devoid of comfort or secure shelter. “Maybe people can realize their way of living now isn’t so bad after all,” Sturdivant said.

He said the rusty mining gear and old buckboard wagon parts scattered across town, the eerie winds rattling tin roofs on sagging buildings, the old lace curtains hanging in tatters behind wavy glass windows, all represent a slice of the past worth preserving.

The ranger’s employers agree. Since 1962, when Bodie became a state park, its preservation has received high priority from the California Department of Parks and Recreation, which oversees 265 parks. “It’s a hallmark of our system,” said one official.

In the lean years for other state parks, Bodie fared well with public money to preserve its buildings. And in 1997, it also benefited from a separate $5 million rescue effort by state officials and private preservationists.

The effort materialized after a Canadian mining company bought up a skyline ridge, just outside the park’s boundaries. The firm’s plan was to grind up the terrain in a mechanized search for gold left over from Bodie’s rich mineral past.

But the Canadians went broke before the bulldozers arrived. The $5 million, collected from a variety of sources including about $2 million in state funds, was used to buy adjoining land to head off any disruptions of the Bodie experience.

Bodie was founded in 1859 by William S. Body (various spellings of his name evolved over time), who made a lucky gold strike nearby, only to die the next year after being caught in a snowstorm. Reports of mineral wealth spread, and by the 1870s, the camp grew into a full-fledged, if remote, gold and silver mining town. Its peak population of more than 10,000 at one time almost equaled that of the young Los Angeles.

Besides the rough-and-tumble life of miners and mill workers, mule drivers, cardsharps and gunslingers, Bodie had a genteel side. It boasted a music hall, still standing and serving as a musty museum, two churches, four newspapers, railroad service, and eventually electric power--although that luxury for years only served the stamp mill on the hillside.

Preserving the town’s structures in a so-called state of arrested decay is the park department’s most challenging and most costly task, Sturdivant said.

Many of the town’s historic buildings require periodic shoring up or occasional rebuilding, he said. Key structural supports are replaced using the same wooden bracing that the original builders did. If more modern methods are called for to prevent a collapse, concrete piers may be inserted, “but we try to keep them out of sight,” the ranger said.

When building exteriors fall away, state repair crews truck in pine plank replacements, just as mule teams did a century ago. Working with the same kind of seasoned pine lumber the old-timers used, state crews blend their patchwork seamlessly into the landscape.

Despite the sturdier construction methods, Sturdivant said, rangers get stark reminders of the old hardships. During a recent winter storm, he said, powerful winds “blew through a wall and filled our museum with snow and water.”

So why stick with it? Most old Gold Rush towns on the western side of the Sierra remain populated, their landmarks of colorful pasts obscured by modern needs and comforts, Sturdivant said.

But not Bodie. Here, the ranger said, “you see the real Wild West just the way it was.”