Death Valley - Rhyolite

Rhyolite is a ghost town on the road out of Death Valley toward Beatty, NV.  It is pretty accessible and that is why I was somewhat disappointed.  All of the building remains were fenced off.  I suppose it was for the average tourists' safety, but it meant that we couldn't get up close and personal with the buildings and it meant that the fence would show up in the pictures.  So they put a crimp in my style.

This first image is of the "Bottle House".  It appears that the builder used bottles as building materials.  The bottom of the bottles were pointed to the outside of the hose and mortar/cement placed around them.  I wonder how much light the bottles allowed into the house???

It appeared that the Rhyolite Mercantile was a building in transition and in transit.  With the windows boarded up, I hope that the building was transitioning to a better state that would help to demonstrate life in Rhyolite.  Also, it was up on blocks as though it had just been moved or as though it was about to be moved.

The instructors gave us an assignment  to make an artistic abstract image and then make an equally appealing image of the "reveal".  As you can see in these next two pictures, I was not very successful!  The first image is an abstract of a broken screen which was in the window of the caboose in the second image.  

The first image appeals to me, but I wish that I had used an aperture that would have given a greater depth of field, which for you non-photographers is the area with acceptable focus.  The second image I don't like so much because it just documents that there was a caboose without wheels sitting in a barren landscape.

At the lower end of Rhyolite was an "artistic" section.  There was a crude woman made from cement blocks.  Hhhmm...  There was a circular stone maze.  And there was an installation that was supposed to be an artist's interpretation of Da Vinci's Last Supper painting.  

It appeared to me that the artist had fiberglass blankets thrown over people enacting the Last Supper.  We photographers thought it would make great images to light up the sculpture on the inside with a flashlight and have the sunset sky in the background.  Notice how the telephone poles on the distant horizon appear to be three crosses.