Our Everyday Life

Part 1 here
Part 2 here

In the morning we realized that home is not that far away, and it is possible to get there by the evening. So after a quick breakfast and preparations we left the hotel and headed toward Oregon. We drove past the Mizpah hotel – it is one of the tallest building in Tonopah. The hotel building was build in 1907 and had an electric elevator, can you imagine that? Tonopah was growing then, the population doubled up in just one year because of many opened new mines in around. Opportunity to get rich dragged many people here.

Then, when the stock market crashed, mines closed and people left – as it had happened in many other towns in California and Nevada. However, the hotel continued to work up until 1999, when it was permanently closed. In 2011 it was bought by Fred and Nancy Cline and they started the renovation and reopened the hotel for the public. The Hotel is famous for it’s ghost named Lady in Red. There are several versions of it’s origin, one of those is that she was a night mistress killed by one jealous client at the fifth floor. Or it was a husband that was too late for the train, came back to hotel only to find out that his wife was spending her time there.

Across the Mizpah Hotel there is another interesting building named Belvada. It was built one year prior hotel and there were a bank and barber shop on the first floor, and the rest of the floors were lent for offices. In later years, the office floors were turned into rooms that could be rented for a small price. But it was closed in 1980 and stays closed nowadays. Later, in 2005, the building was sold, and the new owner wanted to repair the building, and make it a hotel, but unfortunately it didn’t go well. Here some of the buildings interior on the moment of it being bought, made by Jim Galli. Still closed Mizpah hotel is visible on some of them. Recently Belvada had been sold again, to owners of Mizpah hotel now, so there is a hope that everything will go right and Belvada will see guests in the nearest future.

There is a Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant not far from Tonopah. By the way, a similar structure was shown in the movie Sahara 🙂

The tower in the middle of the plant stands at 160 meters tall, or 524.934 feet. It is surrounded by 17,500 mirrors, that focus the heat of the sun on the tower, which provides the heat needed for the salt melt. Before plant started work, it took two months to melt 32,000 tons of salt. It accumulates heat and circulates between the tower and reservoir where is used for steam and electricity production.

Driving past some ruins covered in graffiti, which look to be some ruins from a bunker or a military outpost. We were not able to find any information about these ruins though.

Not far from the ruins, is a salt lake, where at some point was the Rhodes Marsh Station. At 1862, in that place was the time of salt mining, and salt was delivered to the mines of Virginia City, which ironically, is not in Virginia, by camels.

That business was very profitable, because prior that the salt had to be bought in San Francisco at the cost around 120-180 dollars per every ton. Twenty years later, in 1882, the Carson Colorado Railroad was built, which transported the tons of salt and borates they were mining from the mines to sell them. However, sales went down in 1890s because of the new salt fields discovery and the Rhodes Marsh mine was not able to compete with them. Then in 1911, the salt mines were stopped.

There is Hawthorn Ordnance Museum located here and we noticed it some time ago during one of our previous travels.

This tank is from the year of 1952, when they still used gasoline. This tank though never left the base, but other models of the same tanks had been used in the Korean War.

Ship cannons made of very high quality steel, and the museum got a few of them. They didn’t need as many as they got, and they decided to sell some. Than one guy arrived in the pickup truck with the trailer, and asked to buy four cannons. He was able to drive only a couple of miles, before all the tares on his truck lost pressure, because of the cannon weight.

After the museum, we drove further. During the winter, sun down is a lot earlier, and at 5 pm it is already dark. The road was pretty much empty, and because of that, we turned on the colorful christmas lights that we hung on our car..

Not long after that, snow has started, with the big chunks of snowflakes silently falling from the sky. It was beautiful, but we are still five hours away from home and need to cross the mountains. Klamath Falls was ahead of us and the closer we get there, the the lower was the temperature and the thicker was the snow. It wasn’t safe to continue driving anymore so we stopped for the night in the hotel in Klamath Falls.

In the morning there was a lot of snow, and the kids decided to jump around in it while our car was turning on and heating up.

As we drove closer to home, less snow was on the ground and soon there would be none at all on the roads, and surrounding forests were just wet from the rains. We arrived home in the second half of the day, and were also tired, but happy about how our trip turned out..