Rhyolite Ghost Town and Goldwell Open Air Museum, Nevada

A picturesque ghost town in southern Nevada, in the Bullfrog gold mining district, with a split identity as a contemporary sculpture park. The ghost town has a number of multi-story facades still standing from the heyday of the town, which was around 1910, when the population was near 10,000 (the remains of the bank building is in an Ansel Adams photograph). A well preserved bottle house (a house built with bottles as the principal building material, something which was in abundance in booming mining towns) is being watched over by volunteers and the BLM. Another building, the old railway station, has been lived in until recently. The collection of large sculptures began to appear in the 1980's when a Poland-born Belgian artist named Albert Szukalski began making fiberglass casts of area residents. He erected a life-sized sculptural Last Supper, populated with ghostly fiberglass forms. Other sculptures, by other sculptors, followed over the years, including one of a massive pink nude, constructed out of cinder blocks. The sculpture park changed hands after Szukalski's death in 2000, and is now operated as the Goldwell Open Air Museum.