Photos of Ruby Hill Ghost Town
About Ruby Hill Ghost Town
Ruby Hill was a silver town of a couple of thousand people back in the 1870s. What's left of it sits on a hillside a few miles west of Eureka, Nevada. A cloudburst in 1910 took out the little railroad that carried ore down to the smelters, and the place never recovered. NV-780 (Ruby Hill Ave) climbs right up through the middle of the site, so you can work the whole thing from the side of the road. You can easily capture the line of old mine buildings made from timber and corrugated iron, that have now gone grey and rusted in the dry air. You're high up in the Great Basin, so the light comes in hard and clean and the sky goes properly deep blue. Early or later in the day is when the softer light picks out the grain in the wood and the ridges in the tin. Rabbitbrush blooms yellow along the hillsides into autumn and gives you some pops of colour for your foreground. The highway is public, but everything on either side is private mine property and mostly fenced off. Make sure to stick to the public roadside for your shooting and stay out of any buildings outside the fence lines since they have been abandoned for decades. (Eureka, Nevada, USA)
