Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/566324
34 w e s t w o r l d | f a l l 2 0 1 5 istock Water isn't all that men and women thirst for in Nevada. A quest for gold has tempted many to the edge of avarice. On a brisk after- noon, with purplish clouds gathering over the desert, I explore the ruins of Rhyolite, one of dozens of gold-mining ghost towns found in the state. Tucked into a shallow valley just off Hwy. 374, two-and-a-half hours northwest of Vegas, this relic sits like an abandoned movie set over- looking a pitiless landscape. It's an eerie place; window openings stare out from roofless buildings like empty eye sockets, and there is a pervasive, musty smell of memories. In 1908, however, 8,000 people lived here, making Rhy- olite the state's third largest city of the time, with banks, hardware stores, bawdy houses, saloons and a station house for the long- defunct Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. I leave Rhyolite and head down the road to Beatty, the self-proclaimed gateway to Death Valley. Here the tenacious spirit of a mining town is still alive. Beatty is also uncomfortably close to that mysterious, off-limits zone known as the Nevada Test Site, where up until the early 1990s the military detonated hundreds of atomic bombs. At the Beatty Museum, I check out an old hazmat suit, tattered and not exactly confidence-inspiring. at night I sidle up to the Sourdough Saloon as a guest of the Beatty Historical Society, its members outfit- ted in 19th-century period costume. As I stare down a steak as big as a Frisbee, Joannie Jarvis, a fifth-generation Nevadan looking ravishing in an Edwardian-era dress, pulls up a stool next to me and shares her love of small-town life. "I have no desire to move to Vegas. I mean this is a mining town and it's boom and bust. at's just the way it is," says Jarvis. Nevada, fiercely independent and gregarious, has a way of sinking its teeth into the soul. Nevada also sunk its incisors into the thou- sands of workers who built the Hoover Dam, many of whom spent their paycheques in the casinos of Las Vegas, or as my Mexican-born bus driver calls it with an odd fondness, the City of Lost Wages. My palms sweat as I look tenta- tively over the barricade atop the Hoover and down the sweep of butter-smooth concrete plunging more than 200 metres to the spar- kling Colorado River below. With butterflies in my stomach, I walk to the visitor centre, where I meet my guide beneath a sign warning claus- trophobics not to enter. I follow him into the labyrinthine belly of this concrete beast. In the Dirty irties, the White House com- missioned this dam on the Colorado River, 55 kilometres southeast of Las Vegas, where the river snakes along the Nevada-Arizona border. It would help quench the thirst of the south- west, launching one of the greatest make-work projects in American history. Around 3,500 workers toiled on the project, and 112 died on the job. When the dam opened for business in 1936, 2.5 million cubic metres of concrete had been poured into a structure the width of two football fields at its base. Hoover Dam.