When you enter Bodie you can buy a guidebook with these words on its cover:

“And now my comrades are all gone;
Naught remains to toast.
They have left me in my misery,
Like some poor wandering ghost.”

When you leave Bodie, the last thing you see is this hill, blanketed in golden sage and strewn with the machinery built to extract wealth from the ground. The gold is gone and the town has itself become that wandering ghost. All who visit Bodie will carry a bit of that ghost with them forever.

Like many of my other images of Bodie, this works because of its incongruities. The harsh presence of the rusting machinery rising out of the desert’s wild beauty, the small figure of the man on the crest of the hill incongruously compared to the vast scene at his back, and the warmth of the desert colors compared to the barren skies overhead, are all incongruous juxtapositions that help give Bodie its very unique sense of place