When I saw a chance for a road trip in late August, I took it. It had been a long summer. The monsoon mostly fizzled in Silver City, limiting us to early morning hikes on local trails and afternoon crossword puzzles under our ceiling fan. I’d barely lifted my camera for months, unmotivated to search for photos under a blaring sun and too lazy to climb out of bed before dawn to catch fleeting morning light.
So I agreed eagerly to deliver a used car to our daughter in Ferndale, Washington (near Bellingham), spend a few days visiting, and then fly home. My plan was to make the 2,000-mile trip in 2.5 days, leaving a little time to take a few photographs if opportunities arose.
I left Silver City on a hot morning, pausing to photograph familiar scenes along I-10 in New Mexico--a Lordsburg school bus, permanently parked in a gravel lot; a tire shop in Road Forks where gas is cheap--before pushing on to Tucson to spend two nights between doctor’s appointments in a surprisingly luxurious $100 hotel.
Leaving Tucson in the late afternoon after my last appointment, I soon found myself in Phoenix traffic, inching along with hundreds of commuters, the car thermometer pegged at 115 degrees outside my air-conditioned sanctuary. I’d stopped once to photograph a canal delivering water to the city, even as Lakes Powell and Meade shrank to near critical levels and triggered water reductions for the Lower Basin States, but then the heat and traffic squelched my photographic ambition. My admiration for photographers successful in extreme weather grew. Later, between Phoenix and Kingman, I stopped briefly and photographed cacti in the blazing sun at a rest area and a lonely and strangely tilted thunderhead hanging over dry hills west of the highway, producing only virga.
I could relate to Sally Mann, a well-known and sometimes controversial photographer, who once embarked on a long road trip through the Southeast, eager to take haunting images of old plantations and southern rivers, but days in she had nothing, lamenting:
D was keen on finding a graveyard where a Confederate relative had been buried and my heart lifted at the prospect of romantically drooping moss-draped branches and ancient, lichen-covered tombstones. Who can’t get a good picture in a cemetery? Apparently me. Hardly worth bringing out the camera. I was discouraged, the 2nd long day of this trip and so far, three gas stations, a weed-covered hill, and Stalinist blocks of stone instead of tombstones. No moss. Blazing sun, no atmospheric haze. Regular old trees. (Sally Mann from Art Work: On the Creative Life, pg. 171)
I spent that night in Kingman, Arizona in a Ramada Inn decorated with Rt. 66 nostalgia during this 100th anniversary of the iconic highway. The next morning, I woke early and headed for Las Vegas, driving through a strangely hazy landscape of sparse desert vegetation and low hills bathed in what could only be described as drab light, like a classic black and white photograph but without enough contrast. I stopped anyway, forcing myself to snap photos of dirt roads leading away from the highway toward distant hills, hoping to jump-start my creative instincts despite the light, wondering what a good photographer might see that I didn’t.
Finally, I hit a little paydirt in an old Nevada mining town called Goldfield, about thirty miles south of Tonopah. I’d stopped to photograph a mildly-inspiring, abandoned gas station by the highway when a white-bearded local driving an ATV stopped to talk to me. He pointed me down 5th Street to the old ghost town and railroad yard of Goldfield, suggesting that the best photo-opps were there and needlessly apologizing that Goldfield didn’t have more to offer. I headed down 5th to an area where I could have spent the rest of the day had I not had so many miles to cover. I was in a good place in the harsh light of midday, but I tried to make the best of it, photographing old miner’s cabins, railroad cars, piles of junk, and the remarkably untouched remnants of a town that bustled with activity 120 years ago.
Goldfield boomed after particularly rich gold deposits were found there in 1902, soon after Tonopah became a silver boomtown, drawing prospectors to the area. At its peak, 20,000 people lived in Goldfield, making it the largest town in Nevada at that time. Some of the gold was so pure that miners hid nuggets in their boot heels and hollowed-out axe handles according to legend. Wyatt Earp and his brother, Virgil, once roamed the streets. A bar in town was a block long, requiring 30 bartenders to keep the whiskey flowing. But, bust follows boom, and by 1910 the mines were more expensive to operate than they were worth, and the crowds moved on. A flash flood in 1913 destroyed some of the town, and an exploding moonshine still in 1923 set much of what was left on fire. Today, about 225 people live in Goldfield.
More recently, the quirky “International Car Forest of the Last Church”, just outside of Goldfield, has become a draw for travelers. The Car Forest is an installation of old cars, buses, and trucks, embedded as if they’d flown in from outer space, nose-diving into the dirt. Graffiti artists decorate and redecorate. Hipsters make videos. The rest of us walk around in the hot sun, peering into makeshift car-rooms and watching out for snakes.
While researching Goldfield, I was surprised to find a video of Alex Honnold exploring the town and its adjacent car art installation, apparently as part of a Nevada promotional campaign. If you haven’t heard of him, Honnold is famous for palm-sweating unroped climbs of massive cliffs, culminating in his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite, a climb captured in the Oscar-winning documentary, Free Solo. He looked more comfortable in that film climbing the Monster Corner thousands of feet off the deck, unroped, than he did sitting in a makeshift radio studio in Goldfield being interviewed by Carl, the local DJ, and listening to the “Burro Weather Forecast.” He did manage to climb the vertical bus in the Car Forest, a probable first ascent that I now wish I’d ticked before Honnold when I was there in 2024 so that I could call him out on his claim. That would have been a moment of glory.
Just as Goldfield quickly turned from boom to bust, so did my photography. I pulled into Winnemucca after dark that night, booking a room in the Shady Grove Motel. A few of the rooms were occupied by long-term renters—a quiet group of men gathered around a grill in the shade, cooking dinner. Across the parking lot from them, each room was labeled with the name of a saint (or perhaps towns named for saints). Christian martyrs (Ynez, Susana) guarded some rooms while others commemorated domestic activities (Rosa, the patron saint of embroidery and gardening). I pity the newly married couple booking the Santa Rita room, named for the patron saint of “impossible, broken, or deeply troubled marriages.” My room was off to the side, surprisingly large and unconsecrated. After a good meal at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away, I hit the sack, anticipating an early start and a fourteen-hour drive to Bellingham.
The last day of my trip was a grueling push with little time to stop except to get gasoline and fast food. I was lured briefly from the car between Winnemucca and Boise by a collection of animal skulls. Later, I drove into the dense smoke of Northwestern wildfires, over the Cascades, and into the rush of Seattle traffic before arriving in Ferndale in time for dinner.
I'll finish with a few more Goldfield, Nevada photos, a place where someday I'll spend a few days.
very cool pics Ken.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
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