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The Saline Valley is located just west of Death Valley, and is almost as hot as Death Valley itself. It is also far more isolated and undeveloped than Death Valley itself (for example, you are dozens of miles from the nearest electric service or gasoline). The sole road through Saline Valley is a graded dirt road running from Highway 168 in the north (the Big Pine entrance) to Highway 190 in the south (he Owens Lake entrance). The road definitely requires a high clearance 4WD vehicle, like my late, lamented, and much beloved White Thang.
Saline Valley was added to Death Valley National Park in 1994, and many of the mining claims in the area where abandoned over the next several years. One of the best preserved is at Marble Canyon. It is reached by taking Highway168 east from Big Pine, CA, approximately four miles to the Saline Valley turnoff. The Marble Canyon site is about 20 miles down the Saline Valley road.
The first signs you're approaching the mining camp are some buildings and mining equipment that are starting to fall apart:
It amazes me how people managed to build such an extensive mining camp in such an isolated area------you're well over 100 miles from the nearest hardware store, and transporting those materials down the Saline Valley road must have been a huge challenge. The result is impressive:
The interior of the residential building was well preserved;
the kitchen looks like it had been abandoned only a few months earlier:
The National Park Service has a policy of leaving abandoned buildings in the same shape as they were when they came under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service; the buildings are not restored but instead are allowed to naturally decay. The result is that some sites are trashy with lots of junk, like the one at Marble Canyon:
The one exception to this "leave it as it was found" policy involves entrances to mines. The National Park Service seals off the entrances to abandoned mines, as you can see below. This policy is necessary because every year several idiots manage to get themselves badly hurt or killed by exploring abandoned mines; causes include collapse of the mine shafts, poisoning due to toxic gases accumulating in the shafts, rattlesnake bites, etc.
Like many isolated desert locations, the Marble Canyon mining site has some quizzical sights, like this open-air chair:
While the Saline Valley road is isolated and not for 2WD vehicles, it has several signs and is easy to navigate without a GPS receiver or maps. As the photo shows, the Marble Canyon mining camp is at a high elevation. The Saline Valley road is often closed by snow in winter, and the best time to visit is autumn or spring.
The Saline Valley gets only a fraction of the visitors Death Valley gets. It is difficult to reach, but it's worth the effort.
You'll do some serious driving to visit Lida! From Las Vegas, take Highway 95 north for 180 miles until you reach the intersection with Route 266. You will turn left off Highway 95, and it's hard to miss where to turn------the Cottontail Ranch Brothel is at the intersection, and is the only business for several miles. The nearest gas, food, and other services are in Beatty, NV, about 40 miles south. I strongly suggest topping off your gas tank in Beatty. You'll travel about 30 miles on Route 266 to reach Lida. The road is paved, although it is narrow in places.
Lida came into being in 1873 when a post office opened there. Numerous small gold and silver mining claims were being worked in the surrounding countryside, and Lida served those miners with supplies, services (like assaying), and recreation (like gambling and drinking). By 1905, Lida's population reached 300. But that was the peak of mining activity in the region, and the town began to slowly decline. By 1918, the post office closed and Lida was almost totally abandoned a few years later. However, there are still a few people living in the area who conduct ranching operations, so Lida is not totally deserted.
Much of the ruins of Lida is on private property and is fenced off to visitors, so you have to be content with looking instead of touching:
However, a few standing buildings are not fenced off and can be visited:
The state of Nevada erected the sign below to mark the site of Lida. And I got a couple of friendly waves from working ranchhands as I drove through Lida. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to get a similar reception if you visit.
Kelso, California was a stop on the Union Pacific railroad running from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. The site was chosen because of abundant springs in the area for water. Kelso boomed about a century ago because of gold and silver deposits in the surrounding mountains. By 1940, the population was about 2000, but began to drop rapidly after World War II. In the early 1980s, there were only a few people left and Union Pacific wanted to close down all buildings and raze them. Fortunately, a preservation effort was launched and Union Pacific agreed to turn the townsite over to the state of California. Today, Kelso is part of the Mojave National Preserve and is administered by the National Park Service.
Kelso is reached by taking Interstate 15 from Los Angeles or Las Vegas; Baker is almost midway between the two on I-15. From Baker, take Kelbaker Road south 37 miles to the site of Kelso. The road is paved the entire way and suitable for all vehicles.
The most impressive structure in Kelso is the old Union Pacific station shown below. When I visited back in 2001 and took these photos, it was closed. Happily, the National Park Service has restored the building and it now serves as a visitor center and has the only restaurant for quite a few miles:
Another well-preserved building in Kelso is the post office below. This was the last building to close in Kelso back in the 1970s:
Most of the remaining structures in Kelso are behind fencing, meaning you can look but not touch:
The only buildings not protected by fencing are falling apart:
Near Kelso are some impressive sand dunes called, appropriately enough, the Kelso Dunes. David Carradine walked across them in the opening sequences of the 1970s TV program Kung Fu, and you can retrace those historic steps after visiting Kelso.
Warm Springs is really in the middle of nowhere. It's located on Nevada highway 6 about 40 miles east of Tonopah, NV, at the intersection of Highway 6 and State Route 375 (the so-called "Extraterrestrial Highway" that leads to Area 51). The isolation here is about as complete as it gets. You are over 20 miles from the nearest gas station, there is no cell phone service available (or at least there wasn't when I last visited in 2002), and you can get just a couple of weak radio stations on the AM and FM bands. When I drove the 40 miles from Tonopah on a weekday afternoon, I didn't see another car the entire way to Warm Springs. In other words, this is the wrong place to have a flat tire or mechanical breakdown!
Warm Springs was first settled around 1866 as a stopover for stagecoaches traveling from Utah to central California. There are some natural hot springs which, when cooled, provided drinking water for horses and travellers and also allowed growing of some modest forage for animals. By the 1890s, railroads had replaced horses and stagecoaches for travel on the route and the original settlement was abandoned. Below are photos of the surviving ruins from that era. As you can see, many of the structures, as well as the horse corrals, were made from stone because of the shortage of wood in the high desert:
In the early 1900s, bathing in natural hot springs became a popular health fad and Warm Springs experienced a little revival. A swimming pool was built along with bathhouses, a small cafe, and a couple of homes for the workers. As I understand things, Warm Springs was never a "destination resort" but instead catered to travelers on Highway 6 who wanted to relax for a couple of hours in the warm waters before continuing on to Tonopah, Carson City, or the Sierra Nevadas in California. The surviving two buildings at Warm Springs seem to be of fairly recent vintage-----say from the late 1950s or early 1960s----and appear to have been abandoned perhaps in the 1990s or so. The cafe is boarded up and sealed, while the house has been stripped of all fixtures, including electrical wiring and plumbing fixtures. I suppose both are now the property of Nye County because of unpaid taxes:
The swimming pool at Warm Springs is behind a locked fence, although it would be a simple matter to cut the padlock and enter; I wouldn't be surprised if that's not a regular event way out here. Because the water flows into the pool from a hot spring and then flows out through a drain, the water seems fresh and has no signs of algae or other contaminants. One can bathe in the warm water without breaking into the pool by using the water flowing out of the pool drain.
Warm Springs is near two sites that are also worth visiting while you're in the area. Ten miles further east on Highway 6 is the so-called "Base Camp Airfield," an emergency landing site for test flights out of Area 51 to the southwest. This is a 7300 foot runway with several trailers behind a fence with several "No Trespassing: U.S. Government Property" signs. While the facility looks deserted, it is staffed and security guards appear out of nowhere if you stop along the fence line. It is my understanding that Highway 6 may be closed during flight tests at Area 51 if an emergency landing might be necessary. Another 15 miles further east on Highway 6 (or 25 miles east of Warm Springs) is the turnoff for the Project Faultless test site. A dirt road at that point leads about 14 miles to the site of a one megaton underground hydrogen bomb test conducted on January 19, 1968. The area was supposed to be a replacement for the Nevada Test Site, but the underground geology was all wrong for nuclear testing; the Project Faultless explosion caused about 4000 square feet of land to sink a little over ten feet, producing an obvious depression which is still visible. Anyone can visit this site and see the concrete "caps" on the blast tunnels and numerous metal ground markers with cryptic lettering. I wrote about both of these sites in my book Top Secret Tourism.
Of course, you can always head south on state route 375 from Warm Springs and pay a visit to Area 51. I previously wrote about visiting Area 51 here.
Darwin, California isn't a "true" ghost town; as the sign shows, a handful of people still remain. But it's a "zombie" town that seems populated almost exclusively by those on disability or engaged in activities they wish to keep away from the eyes of local, state, and federal law enforcement agents.
Darwin is located on Highway 190, the western entrance to Death Valley National Park (this is the so-called Panamint Springs entrance). It is reached by taking the Highway 190 exit east off Highway 395 just south of Olancha, CA. The road to Darwin is on the right from Highway 190 eastbound, although it is poorly marked and it's easy to zoom right past it------as most visitors to Death Valley via this entrance do.
Darwin in named for Dr. Darwin French, a prospector who discovered silver in the area in 1874. By 1877, Darwin had over 3500 people with water pumped down from springs in the surrounding mountains. There was a silver smelter, a Wells Fargo office, two general stores, a hotel, several saloons and eating establishments, and a weekly newspaper. Because the site was isolated and populated by miners with little to do for recreation but drink, gunfights were common; outbound silver shipments were frequently the targets of robbers. But in 1879, the miners staged a violent strike for higher pay, culminating in a large fire, believed to be arson, that hit Darwin on April 30 of that year. Many buildings were destroyed, including mine offices, and the results were predictable: the mine operators quickly pulled out. and the now permanently unemployed miners had no choice but to do the same. By 1880, the population of Darwin was only 85. But it never completely died.
In 1908, some new lead and copper strikes were made in the area and people began to return to Darwin. By the 1920s, the population was back up to 1000 and remained around that level until all non-essential mining activity was curtailed in 1942. By the time World War II ended, Darwin had less than 100 people. In the early 1950s, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company greatly expanded its lead mining operations in Darwin, even building a new mining camp (complete with housing facilities for workers) that dwarfed Darwin. For a period in the late 1950s, Darwin was the largest producer of lead in the United States. But the mine began to play out, and Anaconda shut down its operations in the mid-1970s. Today, the remains of their large facilities can be viewed in the distance from behind a fence, as shown below. Being a security guard for Anaconda at this facility seems to be about the only source of employment in Darwin:
Much of Darwin looks like the scene below, with plenty of boarded-up buildings from the 1920s "rebirth" and abandoned/inoperable vehicles from the 1950s left to slowly rust in the high desert:
There's no place in Darwin to get any gasoline or your car repaired-----heck, there's no place to buy anything to eat or drink!------but there is this cool abandoned service station/general store. Look at those two neat old "gravity" gasoline pumps still standing out front!
For fun, I suppose everyone in town goes to the Darwin Dance Hall. When I looked through the windows, however, I didn't see much room to dance, only a lot of glass bottles and miscellaneous pieces of wooden furniture:
One building which survives from Darwin's original 1874-79 boom period is the wooden building below which has served as a schoolhouse, then a saloon, and, finally, reportedly a brothel. Maybe it was all three at once; if so, I guess everyone was happy when they had a lot of homework:
Most of the remaining population of Darwin lives in ramshackle dwellings like the ones below, although many have whimsical little touches like the Mickey Mouse head at right. The only water supply to Darwin comes through a single six inch pipe from the adjacent China Lake Naval Weapons Center. One of the people I spoke to in Darwin said the water pressure sometimes falls to a trickle, and residents all stockpile water for drinking, etc., for such times. The nearest grocery store or medical attention is in Lone Pine, about 60 miles away.
Like all small, isolated areas of the American West, Darwin attracts its fair share of eccentrics, misfits, and those who are just plain batshit crazy. They live in places like the "house" below; it's a fiberglass, pre-fab fallout shelter from the 1950s. You were supposed to cover it with soil or concrete to block radiation. You weren't supposed to locate it on the west side of Death Valley, install an air conditioner, and make it your home sweet home:
It takes a special person to live in Darwin. I'm not special.
I've been dreading the day when I would write about Bodie, California. While it is an impressively preserved ghost town, it is heavily visited and a California state park in the bargain. The things I love about "real" ghost towns-----the challenge of getting there, the isolation in them, the total lack of anything "touristy"-----are all missing in Bodie. It has an admission fee, is only open for a few hours a day, and has hordes of tourists driving up from Yosemite to see a bit of the Old West. But at least it's an authentic ghost town-----nothing has been restored-----and the park rangers do a good job of protecting the remaining structures. If you don't mind sharing Bodie with a horde of overweight parents and their snot-nosed kids, this ghost town has a lot to recommend it. At least Bodie looks like what most people think a ghost town should look like:
Bodie is located east of Highway 395 between Yosemite National Park and the town of Bridgeport, CA; it is seven miles south of Bridgeport on 395, and the exit to the east is clearly marked. The first ten miles or so of the road to Bodie is paved, but the last three miles are gravel. The road is no problem for most passenger cars in dry weather during the summer, but mud and snow can be a problem the rest of the year------June through September is the best time to visit. The park is open all year, however, and some visit by snowmobile in the winter. The elevation here is about 8300 feet, and temperatures even in the summer can be cold, especially early or late in the day. No services other than flush toliets are available in Bodie, so be sure to have a full tank of gas and everything else you need before heading out. Drinking water is something you should definitely take, as the altitude and dry air can quickly dehydrate you as you walk around the town.
Bodie was named for Waterman Body, who discovered gold in the hills around the town site in 1859. In 1877, a major strike in the area created the second biggest gold rush in California's history, and by 1880 Bodie had grown to over 10,000 people. The shot below shows the remnants of the mining operations-----they are the gray buildings toward the left. This is where gold was extracted from the mined ore:
Bodie was a wild, lawless town. There were supposedly 65 saloons in operation, gunfights to the death were frequent (as were lynchings and other forms of vigillante justice), and even a Chinatown with opium dens. But by 1900 it also had some surprising amenities, including an opera house, a fire department and a limited fire hydrant system, a railroad line, two newspapers, locally generated electricity, and even a semi-pro baseball team that scheduled games with teams from Reno and Aurora, Nevada.
By the late 1910s, however, the gold veins began to play out and the mines closed. People began leaving Bodie as rapidly as they arrived three decades earlier. During the 1920s and Prohibition, Bodie made a virtue of its isolation and became a center for illegal whiskey and gambling. But fate dealt Bodie a fatal blow on June 23, 1932, when a major fire, fanned by high winds, swept through the town and destroyed most of its buildings. The result is a town site today that has large empty spaces between the remaining structures, as you can see below:
The 1932 fire was the killing blow to Bodie as a living town. Basic services, like electricity and fire protection, were not restored after the fire. The post office and school closed, and all but a handful of residents moved on. By the early 1950s, Bodie was completely deserted and scavengers began to tear down the surviving buildings for their lumber and brick. Fortunately, the state of California purchased the site in 1961 and added it to the state park system in 1964.
Bodie is maintained in what is called a "state of arrested decay." This means no effort has been made to restore the buildings, but steps are taken to prevent further damage to them. The photo below illustrates what is meant by "arrested decay"; the building is leaning badly, but is kept propped up so it doesn't collapse:
Perhaps the most impressive building left in Bodie is the old schoolhouse. Below is a photo I took of it on my last visit back in June, 2004. If you look carefully at the right, you can see Di and our dog Bahrnee:
Another pair of impressive structures is the post office building and an adjoining general store. In the photo below, Di, accompanied by Bahrnee, is looking into the windows of the old store; the brick building at left is the post office:
The photo below shows what was once Main Street in Bodie. All those empty spaces represent where buildings were lost in the 1932 fire.
The scavengers who descended upon Bodie in the 1950s managed to take away most of a bank building, but they couldn't take away the vault. It still stands amid the ruins:
The remaining houses in Bodie were generally owned by the last people to live in the town and were probably occupied until at least the late 1940s:
This final photo is another example of the "arrested decay" theory in action. Yes, it's an outhouse. And there's no other structure within a hundred feet of it; I guess it survived the 1932 fire while the home it was built to serve must have been destroyed. It is now lovingly preserved by the taxpayers of California. There must be some sort of lesson in that:
Garlock is located in the southern Mojave desert, at the foothills of the El Paso mountains, between California highways 14 and 395, just south of Red Rock Canyon State Recreation Area. It came into being around 1887 because springs in the area provided water for travelers and a grazing area for their horses. In 1893, gold was discovered in nearby Randsburg. Because Garlock had a reliable supply of water, an eight-stamp mill was built in Garlock and miners took their nuggets there for refining into bullion. Garlock also became a supply center for miners in the region. By 1899. several hundred people were living in Garlock. It had a church, a school, and something called the "Garlock Literary Society," which was founded, according to its charter, "to be a positive influence on the town's morals." Garlock's ruins are on Garlock Road, accessible from either Highyway 14 or 395, and the site of Garlock is marked by the plaque below:
Garlock's fortunes were tied to Randsburg, and when the Randsburg mines began to fail so did Garlock. By 1903, Garlock was deserted. Today, all of the surviving buildings are located on private property behind fencing. While that means you can't explore the ruins, it also means the buildings are protected from vandalism:
The building below served as Garlock's school, then as a general store/tavern, and, supposedly, as a brothel/speakeasy for the remaining Randsburg miners during the 1920s.
It has been closed for over eighty years and today is slowly falling apart:
Here's another view of the building above from the side:
Maybe Garlock's most enduring claim to fame is the fault named for it-----the Garlock Fault. This is the second longest fault in California and the only major one in the state running east-west instead of north-south. It connects the famed San Andreas Fault with the Death Valley Fault Zone. The Garlock Fault is not as well known (or feared) as the San Andreas and Hayward Faults, but it is geologically active (moving between 2 to 11 millimeters per year) and is overdue for a major rupture and earthquake. In other words, people in Bakersfield, Riverside, etc., need to be very, very concerned about the Garlock Fault. Meanwhile, Garlock itself now sleeps quietly in the high desert.
Carrara is an Italian town famed for the quality of its marble; many surviving ruins of the Roman empire were made from that marble. It's not surprising that a Nevada town founded around a marble quarry would take the name "Carrara."
Carrara is located on Nevada Highway 95 about six miles south of Beatty, or about 100 miles north of Las Vegas. The Carrara townsite is clearly visible toward the east from Highway 95:
Marble deposits were first discovered here in 1904, and the town was formally incorporated, and a post office opened, in 1913. In short order it had a general store, a hotel, a restaurant, a newspaper called the Carrara Obelisk, and a population of a few hundred. It had everything necessary for success except a quality product from its quarry. Despite the hopes of its promoters, the marble found at Carrara was too fractured to make it commercially viable. The population started to drift away, and by 1924 the quarry and post office had closed. The desert began to reclaim the town.
Fortunately, marble was used in the construction of the quarry offices and other buildings at Carrara, making for some impressive ruins:
In the late 1930s, there was an attempt to use the marble to make "ruggedized" cement. That venture failed, but it did leave behind a cement plant. Here's a view from its ruins, looking down the hill toward the rest of Carrara and Highway 95:
Most of the other structures at Carrara were made from wood, and that wood-----along with any metal pipes, etc.-----was removed by scavengers a long time ago. Only rusted-out cans and bits of broken glass indicate this was once a town with people living there. I imagine a lot of visitors zooming north out of Las Vegas toward the Beatty entrance to Death Valley have seen the remains of Carrara in the distance and wondered what they were looking at!
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