Rhyolite ghost town. A bank, a bottle house and a lot of quiet.

Rhyolite ghost town sits in the hills four miles west of Beatty, off Nevada 374, the highway to Death Valley. The Bureau of Land Management runs it as the Rhyolite Historic Area.

• From Las Vegas: about 124 miles, roughly two and a half hours.
• From Pahrump: about 81 miles, an hour and forty minutes.
• From Beatty: four miles west on Nevada 374, then up Rhyolite Road.
• From Death Valley: 35 miles from the Furnace Creek Visitor Center.

Drive times are from a routing service, rounded.

From Las Vegas

Take US 95 north about 117 miles to Beatty. In town, turn west on Nevada 374 toward Death Valley. After four miles, turn right on Rhyolite Road; the townsite is about two miles up. The road is paved the whole way, and any car will do.

Drive times are from a routing service, rounded.

From Pahrump

Take Nevada 160 north about 26 miles to US 95, then US 95 north about 46 miles to Beatty, and Nevada 374 and Rhyolite Road from there.

From Death Valley

Rhyolite is 35 miles from the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, which makes it an easy add-on to a Death Valley day. More on the valley itself in our Death Valley guide.

Beatty is the place for gas, food and a cold drink: see food and fuel in Beatty.

The townsite is small enough for one long afternoon. Here is what you pass, coming up from Nevada 374:

• Bullfrog–Rhyolite Cemetery: the turnoff is on the left, just before the Goldwell entrance.
• Goldwell Open Air Museum: the ghost sculptures, just below the ruins.
• Tom Kelly Bottle House: on the way into town. You will not miss it.
• The townsite: the Cook Bank Building, the train depot, the jail and the ruins of a brothel.

The Bureau of Land Management page for the Rhyolite Historic Area has a live map of the site.

Tom Kelly’s bottle house is built from about 50,000 medicine, whiskey and beer bottles. Out here, glass was sometimes cheaper to build with than wood or stone.

When Paramount Pictures shot the 1926 film The Air Mail in Rhyolite, the studio restored some of the remaining buildings, the bottle house among them. Travel Nevada calls it the oldest and largest known bottle house in the United States. The Bureau of Land Management calls it Nevada’s best preserved.

Cook Bank Building

The Bureau of Land Management calls it the most photographed ghost town building in the West. What is left is part of a three-story bank. It once had marble staircases and mahogany trim, and early Hollywood shot movies in it. A historical marker went up in 2022.

Rhyolite train station

William A. Clark’s Las Vegas & Tonopah Railroad reached Rhyolite in December 1906. Within a year three railroads served the town. The last train pulled out of Rhyolite Station in 1914. The depot still stands.

The rest of town

Walk the old streets and you will find the jail and the ruins of a brothel, along with the ruins of other stone buildings from the boom.

Just below Rhyolite, a group of Belgian artists led by the late Albert Szukalski started a 15-acre outdoor sculpture park in 1984. It is private property, open to everyone, and run as a nonprofit on visitor donations.

The Last Supper

Szukalski’s first piece, from 1984. He wrapped live models in fabric soaked in wet plaster and posed them like Leonardo da Vinci’s painting. When the plaster set, the model slipped out and left the shroud. He coated the figures in fiberglass so the weather would leave them alone.

What else stands there

A 25-foot pink woman made of cinder blocks, a 24-foot steel prospector with a penguin, and pieces added from 1984 to 2024, including Ghost Rider, Lady Desert: Venus of Nevada, Icara, Tribute to Shorty Harris and Ancestral Totem.

Hours, tours and events

• Grounds: open 24 hours, seven days a week. Parking on site and a free self-guided tour brochure.
• Visitor center and gift shop: Monday through Saturday, about 10 AM to 4 PM. In summer it usually closes by 2 PM because of the heat.
• Guided walking tours: one hour, once a month. Beatty Days tours run October 31, 2026, at 11 AM and 3 PM, from $5. The next ones are November 28 and December 19, 2026, at 11 AM.
• Beatty Days, October 31, 2026: a free ribbon-cutting for the new bottle couch, a reading, and sunset at Ancestral Totem.
• Photos: personal photography any time. Commercial photography and filming need the owners’ permission.

In August 1904, Shorty Harris and Ed Cross found gold in the hills here. They called the claim Bullfrog for the green rock, and the Bullfrog Mining District was born. Rhyolite was laid out in 1905, three months after Beatty, and went from a two-tent camp to about 5,000 people in six months. Death Valley’s rangers put the peak at somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000.

At its height Rhyolite had 50 saloons, two churches, eight doctors, a stock exchange and an opera. In 1906 steel magnate Charles M. Schwab bought into the district, and the town got concrete sidewalks, telephone lines, electric street lamps and plumbing.

The bust

The district produced more than $1 million in three years, then the high-grade ore ran thin. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake hurt rail service. By 1910 the mines were closing and the banks were gone. In 1914 the power went off and the last train left. The 1920 census counted 14 people.

Where Rhyolite went

Wood and stone were scarce, so much of the town was taken apart and rebuilt somewhere else. Whole buildings went to Beatty; the Miners Union Hall became Beatty’s Old Town Hall. In 1913 one of Rhyolite’s saloon bars went to Goodsprings, where it is still the bar at the Pioneer Saloon. More on that in our ghost towns near Las Vegas guide, and on Rhyolite’s neighbor in our Beatty history.

• Hours: every day of the year, sunrise to sunset.
• Admission: free. Rhyolite and the bottle house are public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
• Day use only: no camping. Picnicking is allowed.
• Relics: removing, disturbing or damaging ghost town relics is illegal.
• Goldwell: grounds open around the clock; visitor center Monday through Saturday, about 10 AM to 4 PM.

For the weather, see Beatty weather; Rhyolite is about six miles from downtown Beatty. For other old mining towns in reach of the Strip, see ghost towns near Las Vegas, and for the biggest one up US 95, Goldfield.