Beatty, NV is a small town established in 1904 and has been known as the Scenic Gateway to Death Valley. Beatty is steeped in history and has a wonderful old museum filled with the history of Beatty's mining past. (I think they mined borax)
Beatty also has a casino and the well known Death Valley Nut and Candy Company
Outside the Candy Co. are beautiful roses and impressive landscaping.
We met Mr. McCoy who runs the Beatty Museum. He told us so many things about Beatty and where a lot of the things in the museum came from. Outside the museum is a display of equipment used in the Bullfrog Mining District. Oh, did I mention that they were mining "gold". I guess we could have spent the entire day listening to him tell stories about Beatty and nearby Rhyolite.
Rhyolite was amazing if you like "what once was".
It's interesting to note that it took about 30,000 bottles to build the Bottle House
Another thing we found at Rhyolite was the Gold Well Open Air Museum. Chris is sitting on a mosaic sofa. The statues were done in 1984 and depict The Last Supper. 
We left Beatty and drop the four plus miles to the turnoff to Rhyolite. At one time Rhyolite was a boom town when they found gold in the some of the rocks and it's now a ghost town with "parts" of old buildings around the area. One of the most interesting things we saw was the bottle house which seems to be the only place still pretty much as it has always been. Mr. McCoy had given us a booklet by his wife, Suzy, which was a "Self Guided Tour Through Rhyolite, NV". With the help of this booklet and some of the signs at different sites, we were able to recognize what was left of some of the buildings.
On the way to Beatty we say a sign on the highway that said "Big Dune". We asked at the Visitors Center how far the Big Dune was off the highway and was told about three or four miles. So, on the way back to Pahrump, we decided to go out to this dune and see how it compared to Jockeys Ridge in the outer banks in North Carolina. We traveled down a dirt road for about four and a half miles and it just looked like the dune got further and further away. The road was like riding on a wash board so we turned around and left. It appeared that a lot of off the road vehicles traveled in that part of the desert to the dune. Our black Rav 4 was a muted sand color when we got back to the main highway.
We saw was what looked like a "red" mountain. It turned out that it was a "cinder mountain" that was still being mined.
It was a very nice day and we have really enjoyed seeing some of the history that surrounds Pahrump.
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