A gold strike drew 10,000 people to Rhyolite in the early 20th Century. This three-story masonry bank dominated the town. In 1907, a financial panic crippled the boom, and five years later, Rhyolite was a ghost town. Its wreckage stands in the windswept hills not far from the California/Nevada state line and Death Valley National Park. I was drawn to this building by the ghostly shadow cast by its wrecked façade upon the gutted interior. I backed off far enough from the building to include a field of rubble as my foreground, and using a camera with a 28mm wideangle lens, I made this desolate image of an institution that once promised trust and now offers wreckage.