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Tech

Looking Down on California's Best Ghost Town

You can almost see the faceless, dusty prospectors of a bygone era shuffling in after a day's work to any of Bodie's former opium dens.

Bodie, an abandoned gold-mining outpost in the Sierra Nevada, receives about 200,000 visitors every year. But now the registered landmark has a new sort of tourist, one that comes from above: small-fry drones.

In Bodie - From the Sky, Aaron Grimes and Russel Brown spin up a GoPro-toting DJI Phantom quadcopter over Bodie's bombed-out remains. It's what we've come to expect from this sort of thing--sweeping vistas, window reveals, a criminally gorgeous sunset, and so forth--but the whole thing is saddled with a certain poiganancy that for a two-minute short will weigh on you in the best possible way. You can almost see the faceless, dusty prospectiors of a bygone era shuffling in after a day's work to any of Bodie's former opium dens. One buzz for another.

@thebanderson