Mine's end prompts Beatty bust.(news)

BYLINE: MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN REVIEW-JOURNAL

RHYOLITE -- The early spring wind gusts hard through this ghost town, moaning in the barbed wire around the closed mine next door before it sweeps down the road into Beatty.

The Barrick Bullfrog gold mine once was Beatty's largest employer. Its workers made good wages and spent them in town. They volunteered as paramedics and built the high school football press box with company equipment.

But the mine shut down in 1998. A third of Beatty's population left soon after that.

The exodus sapped civic institutions and businesses. The diner and hardware store closed, and cash-strapped schools are weighing cuts in classes and staff positions.

The remaining residents are fighting hard to stop their gritty collection of roadside casinos, manufactured homes and threadbare motels from becoming another ghost town.

"It's depressing," said Kathryn Farthing, whose husband was among the few miners to find work in Beatty after the mine closed. "There's a lot of vacant houses in town."

More than 4.5 million new arrivals called the Mountain West home in the 1990s. The populations of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico together grew by 33 percent, faster than any region in the nation.

But Beatty, and dozens of towns like it, were left behind.

"They're in a sea of growth, and these little islands of no growth is each suffering a single…