Day 26: Tonopah, Nevada & Goldfield, Nevada

Up early at 06:00 and walk down to the gas bar and get some milk - Tonopah is everything you ever wanted in the Wild West - two empty hotels, pawn shop, gunshop etc. The Mizpah Hotel next door is shut up and closed for a decade - our receptionist tells us the whole town is waiting for it to reopen as a symbol of wellbeing.

We call in at the office of the Tonopah Times-Bonanza and Goldfield News for a chat and score two free newspapers. We head up to the Central Nevada Museum where we find information on Henry Frank, Walton E. Dowlen, Edouard Riondel and the Nevada Goldfield Reduction Company. No charge for admission. Quick stops at the Senior Thrift Shop and the Ramada Station for grocery.

We head out to Goldfield for a second visit - see PunchBuggy passim - and make a better job of finding the site of the reduction works. The pictures show a ten-stamp mill for crushing ore, at the museum in Tonopah, and below the best picture I could take of the site of the old reduction works at Goldfield, situated about a mile north of town in what used to be the town of Columbia.