The Tramway Up the Wall

Look up at that line on the canyon wall one more time, because I want you to understand what you're looking at. That is what it took to bring electric light to this corner of California, and it was built by men who had just watched their old world die.

Nineteen fifteen. Forty miles north of here, the great gold town of Bodie is guttering out — the mines failing, the work gone. And word comes down: they're building dams in the high country above Silver Lake. A power project on Rush Creek. Work for any man who can swing a hammer at nine thousand feet.

So the Bodie men came. And what they found was a job that looked, frankly, impossible. The dam sites — Agnew Lake and Gem Lake — sat in granite bowls a couple of thousand feet UP, above a canyon wall with no road, no trail worth the name, no way to get a sack of cement up there, let alone machinery.

Their answer is the line you're looking at: an incline tramway, straight up the face. They drove its timbers into the rock by hand. They winched materials up car by car, load by load — and where even the tram couldn't serve, they floated supplies across the finished lakes on barges. Every yard of concrete in those dams rode up this wall or across that water. Men worked through Sierra winters at altitudes where January means business, hanging concrete on a cliff for day wages.

And what they built, WORKED. When the Rush Creek plant came online it carried some of the highest head — the sheer vertical drop of water — of any powerhouse in California: eighteen hundred feet of fall, spinning turbines that lit towns clear across the eastern desert. It's still part of a working power system today, more than a century on. The tram still creeps up the wall on maintenance runs, on timbers those Bodie men placed.

I want you to hold one picture. A winter morning, nineteen sixteen. A man from Bodie — a town that broke its promises to him — stands at the bottom of this wall in the dark, breath freezing in his mustache, waiting to ride a wooden car up an ice-glazed track at an angle that would frighten a goat, to spend ten hours pouring concrete into a dam form at nine thousand feet. And then to ride it back DOWN, which the old hands would tell you was the part that took real nerve. No harness. No helmet. Day wages. They did that, in shifts, through two Sierra winters — and the records of the era treat it as unremarkable, which tells you everything about what those men considered normal.

One of those workmen, by the way, was a fellow named Roy Carson — who looked around at this canyon while he worked it, decided the job site beat every hometown he'd ever had, and stayed to found the resort you just passed. His name is on the peak above you.

A dying gold town's last crew, a staircase nailed to a cliff, and a hundred years of light. That's what that little line in the rock is. Drive on — but you'll hear the water they captured one more time before this road is done.