A stone wall and empty sign post are the only visible exterior to what was once the nicest brothel in Ely, Nevada. "Bronc Alley" is the name given to the west end of Ely, Nevada's High Street. Throughout the mining and railroad town's history, brothels flourished in a couple different sections in town, though Bronc Alley was the heart of its Red Light District. Today, active houses of prostitution along this section of High Street continue to bathe adjacent Highway 50 in red neon. However one former brothel remains empty and slowly falling to the elements. Opened in 1959, The Green Lantern wa ...
The Cherry Patch Ranch brothel in the southern Nevada town of Crystal has a storied history. The building, owned by infamous brothel owner Dennis Hof, sits just up the road from the Love Ranch building where Hof's dead body was found after celebrating his 72nd birthday. While he unquestionably used his media savvy to build the reputation and advertise his properties, Dennis Hof may not have even been the most interesting personality to have had a hand in the brothels in Crystal... A view of the Cherry Patch Ranch brothel trailers and adjoining restaurant Maynard "Joe" Richards was born in Duluth, Minnes ...
As one of the most arid states in the country, Nevada may not share in the presence of breathtaking waterfalls in neighboring states like Arizona, California or Oregon. Though those who have an appreciation for the desert can find a meditative quality in coming across the areas with streams, freshwater springs, and year-round waterflow in places that are otherwise hot and dry most of the time. While much of the state's landscape of over 300 mountain ranges and valley floors that once lied beneath ancient seas were formed in part by water - either inland seas or flash flooding - in current times there is much less water present, with ...
Standing like a scene from a horror film, what sets the abandoned cabins of the Round Hill Pines Resort apart from any other collection of log cabin lodge buildings are the real estate that they sit on. Occupying a hillside vantage point set atop the lakeshore in Lake Tahoe's exclusive Zephyr Cove area, the former Nevada resort site covers acres beneath picturesque pine trees overlooking Tahoe's emerald waters. Though several old ghost towns, mill sites and mining camps lay throughout the Lake Tahoe area, the high value of the area has left this resort a rare outlier in that it sits adjacent to the lake itself, remaining empt ...
Three Kids Mine; Las Vegas, Nevada Three Kids Mine on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada may be less worthy of mention for its past than for its post-use roles due in large part to its position on the increasingly-encroaching fringes of the urban center. Built in 1916 and opened the following year, Three Kids Mine consists of a massive 300 foot deep open pit, along with two other nearby smaller pits from which high grade manganese ore was mined. Though today it sits not far from the boundary of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, at the time of the mine's construction, the Hoover Dam was still over a de ...
The International Car Forest of the Last Church On the outskirts of the mining town of Goldfield, Nevada - a population of only a couple hundred people in a town without even a gas station on Nevada's Highway 95 - is an installation that is part outsider art and part surreal junkyard called The International Car Forest of the Last Church. Though no signs will direct you there, and nothing will explain the history or motivations behind it even after you arrive, the sprawling collection of vehicles - cars, limos, busses, and delivery trucks - rise upended down a few double track dirt roads near Goldfield's southern en ...
An accidental series of events while drilling in search of sources of geothermal energy in the rural Northern Nevada desert resulted in the growth of a picturesque formation of terraced pools and colored spouts that has come to be known as Fly Geyser. It's one of the most colorful and odd land formations in Nevada, though its creation was purely an accident. Fly Geyser, a misnomer as it is actually an artesian spring, was created when a 1964 geothermal exploratory drilling operation struck an underground hot water stream, sending the mineral-rich water gushing into the air. Efforts to cap the spring weren't ...
Bobbie's Buckeye Bar was a legal brothel in Tonopah, Nevada, run by the charismatic Bobbie Duncan Himes until her death in 1989. Despite efforts to later reopen, it would never operate as a brothel again. Born in Billings, Montana in 1915, Mary (Bobbie) Duncan would first make her way to Tonopah in 1941 en route to Hawaii. She worked Tonopah's red light district until World War II, during which she travelled to Lusk, Wyoming where she came under the tutelage of 'frontier madame' Dell Burke at the Yellow Hotel brothel. Burke would take those she felt showed the drive to work as lifelong brothel owners and ma ...
"We were six prostitutes in a ranch house in the middle of the desert, isolated from the rest of the world, screwing frustrated and horny men for money. That was our life and as far as we were concerned it was as normal as Rice Krispies." -Vickie Star, brothel owner Vickie Star's is a story of a woman who moved west from her Missouri farming upbringing and eventually ended up owning two separate Nevada brothels before retiring to live off of the money she saved from her years in the business. Born to a Garrison, Missouri family in 1923, at age 16 Vickie received an invitation from her older sister to move into her apartment in Sa ...
(Actually... 23 Nevada Hot Springs) We got out of the car, excited to see a small pool of water in the place that we had hoped to see one. The last dozen or so miles of the drive was down a rutted dirt road, and after hitting more than a couple jarring holes without enough time to bring the car's speed down, we did the long drive slowly, checking the trip odometer judiciously as the setting sun left its glow across a wide plain of sagebrush with few discernible landmarks to use as reference points. Nevada's natural hot springs are remarkable because the state has more of them than anywhere else in ...
The facade of the Lazy B Guesthouse Ranch sits on the outskirts of Fallon, Nevada - what remains of the brothel is as no-frills as the brothel itself was during its tenure of service. The Lazy B Ranch was a small brothel sitting just east of the town of Fallon. Opened in 1975, the ranch was located along Nevada's Highway 50 near the mining and ranching operations of the north central region of the state, along with the nearby Fallon Naval Air Station. The ranch operated during the peak 1980's era of Nevada's legal houses of prostitution with 35 located and operating throughout the state. Though the later years of the Lazy B would be ...
Conflicts over use of Nevada's Garden Valley is the location of Michael Heizer's land art project, City, led to the region being designated a National Monument. Michael Heizer is an artist known for his creation of large works of 'land art', typically sculptures, or 'negative sculptures' created by displacing large amounts of dirt and stone and left on location, primarily in desert regions of the American Southwest. Started in 1972, Heizer's project, known as City, covers an area nearly 1.5 miles long and a quarter of a mile wide in Nevada's Garden Valley. However, over that time, the federal government has eyed Garden Valle ...
The remains of the Old Bridge Ranch (which sit on the site of the original Mustang Ranch) amidst a picturesque Nevada landscape. Sitting in the Truckee River valley of northern Nevada lies the Old Bridge Ranch, a legal brothel that operated near the storied Mustang Ranch - in fact, the Old Bridge Ranch was built on the site of the original location of the Mustang Bridge Ranch, and over the years has acted as compliment and competition to the Mustang. Popular for being one of the nearest brothels to the Reno area, Old Bridge owner David Burgess was the nephew of Sally Conforte (the wife of colorful Nevada brothel o ...
St. Thomas, Nevada a ghost town re-emerging from beneath the waters of Lake Mead. "There are two easy ways to die in the desert: Thirst and drowning." - Craig Childs What's left of town of St. Thomas once sat hidden at the bottom of Lake Mead, though many foundations of this former town have recently been uncovered due to the declining waters of the lake. In 1865 - five years into the American Civil War and with minimal cotton production from the southern US - Brigham Young sent a group of families south from the heart of Utah Territory to the Moapa Valley, a valley in the arid Mojave Desert near the con ...
Cottontail Ranch an abandoned brothel in Nevada In Winter of 1967, Melvin Dummar, a 23 year old magnesium plant worker from Gabbs, Nevada, was driving through the Nevada desert one night when he pulled off the highway and onto an empty dirt road about seven miles south of the Cottontail Ranch for a quick bathroom stop. It was here that Dummar saw a man lying down, beaten and bruised, in the dirt road. He would ultimately give him a ride to Las Vegas where the man asked to be dropped off, leaving the dazed stranger with a little bit of money at the back of the Sands Hotel, before continuing on toward his destination i ...
Janie's Ranch Located on Nevada's Highway 6 between Tonopah, Nevada and Bishop California, Janie's Ranch was a brothel constructed of multiple trailers parked side by side with connecting rooms and hallways. The ranch was built on land occupied by a former railroad stop, located near a cluster of fresh water springs piped down to fuel the steam locomotives. During the ranch's existence, that water was used to feed the lush foliage surrounding the property, as well as a pond that sat behind the owner's house. Former owner, Betty, wanted to house the women in separate rooms than those they entertained in, reserving on ...
Southern Nevada Zoological and Botanical Park The Southern Nevada Zoological and Botanical Park, often called the Las Vegas Zoo, was located on three acres in a mixed residential and commercial area of Las Vegas and held over 150 species of animals. In 2013, relations between the park's trained zookeeping staff and park owners Pat and Muffy Dingle reached a tipping point. After years of customer complaints and USDA violations citing poor vet care, lack of shade protection from the Las Vegas sun, poor pen conditions, improper food, and general disrepair of the center, zookeepers who had remained working to provide what care they cou ...