Volunteers to spruce up Virginia City with intense cleaning

Tourism Cares For America is bringing its volunteer force to Virginia City on May 18 to polish up the aging but authentic city built atop the famed Comstock Lode in the mid-19th Century.

The volunteers will clean historic street lamps, weed cemeteries, clean and polish the wood pews of St. Mary's of the Mountains Catholic Church, clean up the Virginia & Truckee Railroad yards, rebuild a stairway at Piper's Opera House and more.

Tourism Cares is a nonprofit organization with membership limited to employees or owners in tourism-related businesses. Each year the organization conducts a cleanup or restoration project at some tourism destination. Past project sites included Mount Vernon, Va., (George Washington's estate), a 215-year-old cemetery in St. Louis and Ellis Island. Most projects, including the Virginia City one, are limited to a single day of intense energy, but a 2006 restoration on the hurricane-wrecked Mississippi Coast was expanded to three. The Virginia City site is the first chosen in the West.

Volunteers for the upcoming project pay for their own transportation to Virginia City and lodging there, and a $75 registration fee. After their work is finished the workers will have the opportunity to tour Reno, Lake Tahoe, Carson City or the Carson Valley; these tours will be free, hosted locally.

For additional information on the organization, visit its Web site at www.tourismcares.org.