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Tag: california

Log Cabin Gold Mine

Abandoned

        Set at an elevation of 9600' amidst the mountain peaks above Mono Lake and the town of Lee Vining, the Log Cabin mine experienced prosperous boom periods before a presidential executive order during World War II banned the mining of non-strategic materials, leading to the shuttering of operations at the mine. The mine was maintained and ready to be reopened at a moment's notice, however a couple fledgling attempts at reopening and the discovery of contamination of the grounds has instead led the mine to a slow decay. Originally mined under the Mendocino Claim filed in 1890, the Log Cabin Gold Mine ...

Reward Mine

Abandoned

Reward / Brown Monster Mine An abandoned gold mine in the Eastern California mountains with an extensive underground network of tunnels and adits.     The site today known as the Reward Mine is made up of multiple mining claims that have merged over time, though which today sit in a mostly abandoned state. Following its discovery in 1870, the Reward Mine primarily produced gold and silver, with copper and lead being secondary minerals mined from the mountain shafts located in the Eclipse Canyon area of California's Inyo Mountains overlooking the Owens River Valley. At an elevation of 4000', the Reward Mine sat adjacent to ...

Albatross Plane Wreck

Abandoned

  Death Valley Albatross Plane Wreck   On the day of January 24th, 1952, a Grumman SA-16 Albatross took off from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho bound for San Diego carrying a 6 total occupants. The one-day, non-stop flight was part of a classified training mission supporting CIA Cold War operations. As night engulfed the skies around 6:30pm, one of the Albatross' dual engines gave out. Losing elevation and velocity, the pilot gave the order for the plane to be evacuated. All of those onboard would jump from the rear door and land about 14 miles north of Death Valley's Furnace Creek with no injuries, while the now-unman ...

Zzyzx Mineral Springs

Abandoned

  Zzyzx Mineral Springs Resort   Sitting near the northern edge of southern California's desolate Mojave National Preserve is the incorporated community of Zzyzx, California, a small area centered around a the Zzyzx Spring. In recent history, this water source formed the foundation for a small population center first based on a train station, and later as the real estate speculation of a quack "medical doctor" and scam artist. Lake Tuendae, where the spring water collects into a large rectangular march - with a fountain remaining in the center of the lake from the days of Howe's resort - is some of the only habitat for the ...

Lake Los Angeles

Interesting

  Lake Los Angeles   Lying about 50 miles northeast of the city of Los Angeles, California, sits Lake Los Angeles, a community in the eastern Antelope Valley whose lake, today, is the non-existent remnant of the town's manipulative speculative real estate history. Lake Los Angeles has no lake, and sits on the western edge of the Mojave Desert at an elevation of over 2600', feeling much closer to an eastern California desert town and much further from the metropolitan image evoked by the name, Los Angeles. Once called Wilsona after then-president Woodrow Wilson, and then Los Angeles Buttes, it was real estate speculators in ...

Rock-A-Hoola Waterpark

Abandoned

Milky Way above the arcade building, Rock-A-Hoola Waterpark, California   A barren oasis in the Mojave Desert may be more popular in abandonment than it was during its tenuous incarnations.   Off of Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the town of Newberry Springs sits the remains of "the first waterpark in America". Originally opened in 1962 by Bob Byers as a manmade lake and recreation area built atop a spring and named after his wife, Lake Dolores came to feature several attractions based around the water. A set of slides where riders would slide down and glide across the lake on 'floats', two V-shaped metal s ...

Drawbridge

Abandoned

The Ghost Town of Drawbridge, California   The only ghost town in the San Francisco Bay is an island that once operated two railroad bridges. .   Located on Station Island in the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, the town of Drawbridge originally had one home for the operator of the island's two bridges allowing the Southern Pacific Coast narrow-gauge railroad to cross the slough between San Jose and Newark (now the city of Fremont). In the 1880's, Drawbridge grew from a town of one building to 90 buildings at its peak in the late 1920's, though the town itself had no roads, but rather the railroad bed served as 'Main Str ...

Mormon Island

Abandoned

Nighttime at Mormon Island California's drought conditions have caused the water level of Folsom Lake to fall, revealing the ruins of a mining town buried beneath its waters 60 years ago.   In 1955, following the completion of the Folsom Dam project - a dam built at the confluence of the North and South forks of the American River about 25 miles northeast of Sacramento, California - the rising waters of Folsom Lake consumed and made hidden the remnants of the town of Mormon Island. The town would lay buried beneath the waters for nearly 60 years. Founded by a party of deer hunters from Sutter's Fort (which would later become the ...

Hinkley

Abandoned

The Future Ghost of Hinkley, California after contaminating the town's drinking water, PG&E begins buying out the residents, resulting in a town of abandoned and demolished buildings.   Hinkley, California, an incorporated community located about 14 miles northwest of the city of Barstow, was a quiet desert town boasting a few businesses, including a grocery store and gas station, and had one school serving the population. Today, however, Hinkley is a ghost town in-the-making, as many of its residents have left, and the population continues to shrink as the few remaining businesses close. This shift is due to the contamination of ...

Summit Tunnels

Abandoned

  Donner Summit Railroad Tunnels abandoned tunnels from the first transcontinental railroad route through the Sierras.     Just below Donner Peak in the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range in California lie the remains of the tunnels and snowsheds constructed for the first transcontinental railroad route. In the 1860's, the Central Pacific Railroad, in a race against Union Pacific, sought to complete the first transcontinental line. The heavy snows of the High Sierras required the construction of several miles of tunnels and snowsheds along the mountain pass, constructing 15 tunnels in all. (The difference betwee ...

California City

Interesting

  California City   Located about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, and 65 miles southwest of Death Valley, is California City, a desert exurb of about 15,000 people which also houses a correctional center and sits not far from Edwards Air Force Base and the Rio Tinto Borax Mine, the largest open-pit mine in California. But if you venture outside the core of this town, you'll arrive at a grid of dirt roads extending into a skeleton cartography of cul-de-sacs and neighborhoods which have never materialized. Southern California in the 1950's was marked by a trend of movement out of cities and into newly-created suburbs. Ai ...

Bayshore Roundhouse

Abandoned

  Bayshore Roundhouse   I've always felt that geographies and places have the ability to carry their own set of circumstantial forces and events that make up its past and current state of being, and, like with other people, that those elements can help shape the intersection between a place and a person, and if you approach these encounters without expectation, they can fall naturally and take on the direction that most benefits those involved. This is amongst the reasons I've always felt drawn to the places that others have determined lack value or use. But if approached, it's visiting these damaged and abandoned locales ...

Sunny Acres

Abandoned

  Sunny Acres Detention Facility Originally opened as the Children's Home at Sunny Acres for orphaned children in 1931, Sunny Acres, sitting on  a hillside above a central California valley, came into existence with the optimistic goal a community helping those less fortunate during the Great Depression. Serving as a home for orphans and wards of the court, over time reality had a way of eroding the optimism, until in its later years it became Sunny Acres Juvenile Hall, and eventually was given the nickname Hell's Acres. Staffed by a matron and a maid, records noted cause for admittance included misbehavior and trouble in school,  the ...

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