A chuckwalla leaps from a rusted-out stove and hits the gravel with a fat slap. The sound is jarring in the absolute silence engulfing the ghost town of Delamar and Jeff and I jump at it reflexively. The lizard scurries quickly under the stove and the air is quiet once again.
The sun is getting low on the horizon, shooting beams of pure gold through the wooden scaffolding and perfectly squared windows of the ruins standing all around us. Sunlight is the only form of gold this town has seen since 1934. Delamar was built on gold and ruined by gold and rebuilt on gold once again. At its peak, the town churned through 260 tons of quartzite ore every day in hopes of finding gold bullion worth $20.67 an ounce at the time.
But the town of Delamar traded gold for lives with these Nevada mountains. Miners and town folk spent their days breaking apart the rough white quartzite and inhaling glass-like particles in the process. Years of breathing in the fine dust led to widespread silicosis, a disease of the lungs that slowly suffocates its sufferers. In addition to gold, Delamar produced widows: over 400 of them at its peak.
Stepping carefully through the sagebrush, Mojave prickly pears and stray bits of rusted metal, Jeff and I trace a path between broken stone buildings. Struck on an east to west axis, the ruins loom on the hill slopes, peering out over the desert with eyeless window sockets. Squat and square with walls nearly a foot thick, the construction of these buildings speaks to Delamar's aspirations. It was built to last, to endure, to provide shade and shelter from the relentless Nevada sun. Delamar was built for the ages in a way no modern house or bank or office building is built. Generations were meant to inherit this place, bones buried and babies born.
But the world changed. Demand collapsed and the gold seams dried up. Eventually, pumping water from the Meadow Valley Wash over 12 miles away became too arduous to justify. The deserts of Nevada brook no inefficiencies, ejecting or swallowing anything and anyone whose labors outweigh their resources. The widows of Delamar left town for good in 1934, leaving those they lost to the mines in an iron-fenced cemetery just over a westerly ridge. For the better part of a century, Delamar has sat in stillness weathering sands and sun and storms. With each passing season, Delamar falls farther out of the realm of civilization, farther out of memory, and deeper into the ephemeral.
Jeff and I went out in search of Delamar to get away. Living in Las Vegas, one doesn't often encounter silence, stillness and privacy. Even the places we commonly view as refuges - our nation's parks, scenic byways and public lands - are no longer the quiet havens they once were. Recreation is on the rise, especially in a post-pandemic era where many people's greatest fear is sharing air with strangers. It is right and good for them to have spaces to breath and explore. But it must be said that there is something being lost in this great outpouring of urbanites to the outdoors. The land feels smaller and less wild, save for a scant handful of places that remain unknown or forgotten. Places like Delamar.
As we move farther away from the safety and security of the car and deeper into the ruins, Jeff and I begin to feel joy at the realization that our experience is entirely unsupervised in this place. There are no interpretive signs, no park rangers mulling about, and no one to answer our many questions. We are at play here, like children let loose, taking risks and seeking thrills. We walk on rough-cut wooden beams 5 inches wide and 8 inches deep that flex with each step. We enter each building cautiously, listening for the telltale rattle that signals occupancy of such spaces in the desert. Pinching the white earth between our fingers, we marvel at the fine quartzite dust that might kill us both if we should linger here too long.
But ghost towns, we're learning, are like wildernesses: places where humans visit but do not remain. Delamar is part of this landscape now, no more out of place than the aromatic bushes and thorny cacti that coat these slopes. Time and the wild have reclaimed this space, winding themselves around and through the ruins of Delamar as though rooting them to the soil itself.
The winds are coming and the sun is leaving. It's time for us to go, and not return.