I can see why everyone fled. It is boring, dusty, hot (but it is a dry heat), and poverty stricken. There are only like 5 buildings, if you can call them that. The few interpretive signs that exist are not very informative. There is only 1 ranger, but his main job is to stand at the gate of the dumb coke bottle house and talk about it, and ignore the real reason people come. Speaking of people that take advantage of the tourists: there is a quasi-hippie art commune that you have to fight your way through. It pretends to be a ghost town, full of artsy ghosts with bikes. In all reality these hippies are the real reason Rhyolite became a ghost town. The town people must have gotten sick of looking at their crappy attempts at art and ran to the awesome city of Beatty (seriously, it was nice, CHEAP gas!)