Ghost Town Vacation

I took a lot more photos of mountains than I am going to show you. After a while they all start to look the same. But I liked the snow-capped ones.
The road to Belmont was actually paved. This was not always the case on my travels. Though it was paved, the road was abandoned and not maintained.
The town of Belmont is located in the Toquima Mountains.
On the way into town there were some ruins visible from the road. This is an old chimney from a mill or something.
Being at an elevation of over 8000 feet, there was quite a bit of snow still on the ground from a heavy snowfall they got a few weeks before.
I don't know what this used to be. Maybe an cabin chimney. Or maybe just a tall pile of stones.
The sky was clear and the air was crisp in Belmont this morning. There is supposedly a good cemetery off the main road, but the road was completely covered in snow. I could have tried to walk there, but the snow was deep and I didn't exactly know where it was anyway. Oh well, I saw cemeteries in other towns.
This saloon is still operating but was not open. Why would it be? There is no one around on a Saturday morning in January.
If I'm not mistaken, this used to be a bank. I really like these old facades that are still standing while most of the rest of the buildings long ago crumbled away.
Back behind the building was this old abandoned pickup. There are several houses in Belmont. Many of them looked like little vacation homes. There was a larger house on the side of the hill that looked occupied.
Standing on the road to the Belmont Courthouse. It was completed in 1876 when Belmont was the Nye County seat. The trouble is that mining operations started to dry up at around the same time. Within a couple of decades almost everyone had left.
In 1974, the county deeded the courthouse to the Nevada Division of State Parks to restore and maintain the building. That's why it still stands as a wonderful example of the town's glory days.
The old jail in the back of the building.
I'm not sure, but these look like jail cells. I don't know if they used to be in the building or were always outside.
One preserved building (the courthouse) and one pile of rubble.
There is a B&B in town. I saw no one around though. Perhaps business in the dead of winter isn't all that good.
The original Belmont Church was moved a long time ago. A new one was constructed using the original blueprints. It looks rather quaint there on the snow-covered hillside.
The Combination Mill in the East Belmont.
Just a peek in the doorway. I see some stupid people have spray painted on the wall. How nice.
There was a road that continued east from the mill, but it looked a little dodgy. There was too much mud and snow to risk traveling, so I doubled back to get onto US Hwy. 6.

About Belmont: After silver ore was discovered in the 1860's, miners and other people drawn to boom towns rushed to Belmont. By 1867 the population reached 2,000, and Belmont was made county seat of Nye County. Eight year later an act was passed to build the county courthouse. As was the case in mining towns, a drop in mining production was the beginning of the end for Belmont. While mining picked up a bit in the next decade, it pretty much stopped shortly after. The population of the town dropped to around 150, most of which were county employees. The county seat was moved to Tonopah in 1905. So after a brief ride of success of approximately twenty years, Belmont became the ghost town we see today with a courthouse that stands in the middle of town like it is just waiting to be used again.