Inside California's Lost Desert Town (isolated from society) 🇺🇸

a hippies versus the redneck town the road less traveled my name's stranger i'm strange there's no church we have no sheriff we have no jail you have so much personal freedom every day whatever you want to do can you imagine horses and carriages somehow getting over these ranges of mountains there could be some people that are actually very wealthy here well i'm a millionaire our spring is on the navy base hey n6bkl this is kj68chan are you around jim are you going to fix this one up here your house was a saloon that was an ice locker sometimes you arrive in a small town and you wonder like are people peering through their curtains with a loaded shotgun that's your truck so nobody wants to leave here these are the old style pumps well i think i can take six gallons today charlie people are curious as hell i'm curious about them too it'll change you forever [Music] beautiful rugged quiet death valley california one of my favorite places in the world today guys we have quite an adventure we're going over those mountains taking a left on a dirt road and entering a town in people that have decided to opt out of society live far removed from everybody else the goal is to talk to some locals get their perspective on this very fast changing world why they decided to live away from everyone else and learn whatever else we can from them it's quite often people that live much differently than us are the ones that can teach us something [Music] looks like an old mining shaft so a lot of these towns out here were former mining towns and when the minerals ran out so did the people really rug it out here dry as a bone it wasn't really that long ago that california was being explored you know you had the 1849 gold rush and that's when most people were leaving the east coast and taking the long treacherous journey across the country it was the true adventurers coming out here it was those looking to strike it rich and can you imagine like horses and carriages somehow getting over these ranges of mountains obviously water isn't easily available there's actually a spring a couple of valleys over here that i was at yesterday but you know your food your water the unknown the great unknown it had to be an exciting time just a very real no error of no we just need to survive the next day and everything else doesn't really matter and now look at me i'm driving a rental car up over a mountain road there's no cell phone reception out here there's no gps we go down this wash here maybe the town is at the bottom we'll see we're now in the basin of a riverbed oh this is cool death valley receives very little rain but when it does rain and these can fill up and they just sort of flood out through here you can see there are trees there on the top of some structure so obviously when people live away from everyone else [Applause] they might not want to be on camera so i got to feel this out i don't want to do anything anyone doesn't want to do and i have no idea how i'll be received here i don't think they see too much traffic coming in this way you can see a lot of metal out here just scrap there are a lot of military bases out here on the california nevada border you see jets ripping the skies occasionally and then there are testing sites i was just about to say this is starting to get interesting like we're getting into greenery going down an elevation and then this that's the end there's only one other fork and it looked like the road less traveled you know usually i like the road less traveled but i thought in these parts take the main road and oh here i am no idea what that is is it a part two an airplane what is that somebody's cooler down here with fish wow the desert is so beautiful when there's an oasis all this greenery and growth comes out relaxes the eye makes everything soft calm very clear water natural spring here and approaching someone's home i don't know if someone actually lives there or not okay guys false climax it's just an old mining structure it's been shot up a thousand times i went down that way i guess there's this way so guys i'm gonna put the camera down just to see how this goes and if i can roll in here or not and uh we'll see if we can get in with the locals the locals i spoke with in this town asked me not to mention its name so i silenced the town's name every time it came up in conversation where are you from originally palo alto california how long have you been out here well i've been in and out since i moved to death valley in 1979 and i've been in and out ever since then more more in lately so this is the uh oh beautiful classic will this get over these mountains pretty good oh easily it goes everywhere that i want to go using common sense and more importantly it takes me back home again it's the big draw living out here um you can do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anybody and um sometimes you arrive in a small town and you wonder like are people like peering through their curtains with a loaded shotgun but not well the town used to be like that 40 years ago or so okay when i first started coming here in the early 1980s it was definitely a hippies versus the redneck town oh and the rednecks over the decades have just sort of moved away and um you never formed an alliance the hippies and rednecks no okay they did not get along so now it's pretty much you know aging hippies that live here and you never know about about politics and religion and things like that well there's no church we have no sheriff we have no jail you guys regulate each other like everyone gets along yeah pretty much everybody gets along there's a very delicate balance we all care about each other we're there in a heartbeat to help somebody out in a bind but we stay out of each other's personal business to the extent that they don't want to share it and then we've got uh post office post office there's a library is that what that is yeah take a look take a few leave a view okay and there's another library in our what we call our town hall which oh i got to see that i mean as long as you're here you might as well get a good job i want to see the whole the whole shebang look he's being paid to take the flag down why are you taking it down the end of the day end of the day what time closes it to oh it's two o'clock it's ten o'clock to two o'clock and then on saturdays it's ten o'clock till noon it's not uncommon to have some total stranger knock on my door because i'm like the first sign of life when you come into town people are curious as hell oh yeah and you know i'm curious about them too so these two women were from somewhere in in los angeles oh wow this is this looks like a nice house i think would you like to see the inside or like a little shocked like maybe i'm the boston strangler or something you know here in this remote town i might pull out a gun and i said nope please you're what if you don't want to come in that you won't hurt my feelings but i thought you might want to see a classic old house and so they came in they look oh wow look at that wood stove do you have a furnace i said you're looking at it that's the only way i stay warm and you know we spent maybe 45 minutes together and then we walked back out to their car and one of them said you know we lived in the same house in pasadena or wherever it was for 30 years and we don't we've never been in our neighbor's backyard in the spring we often have a by invitation only party called the spring of a jig what is everyone invited you have to uh be on the list okay and there might be a hundred people in town with uh little jams acoustic guitar and bongo jams and that kind of stuff around town and people bring things to bring to the table for the grand potluck and i've got a pretty good wine cellar at my house there and i usually bring a couple of bottles of really good jaylor wine that you can't get in the grocery stores i'm kind of a hippie i'm a liberal hippie and many of my neighbors are too and what we can learn is that that's not a bad way to live a life because there's sharing uh time and help and food and the desire to have a good time while we're on the planet while we still have life and that's that's what we do here so where is everybody right now you're nobody's on the streets during the day uh well we are but this is not uncommon it's this quiet it's just quiet people are using the internet or watching television so nobody's offline okay so that doesn't exist i was thinking maybe i'd run into a town where there's like no internet that would be very unusual that would be maybe nevada somewhere i don't know because of the fact that anybody anywhere on the planet can get satellite internet now yeah where do we go this is the radio here this is me california historical society kj six hm is my call sign let's say i want to call see if my friend dan said hey n6bkl this is kj68n are you around so basically this is 1960 zoom without the video camera fair to say mm-hmm yeah you could make that comparison ah heavy huh yeah you put 28 volts in and you get 700 volts out okay that's how they did it back then so what happens is you check in and you get a spot in the rotation so i happen to be the third one to check in and then you know we talk and then we keep an eye on the on the clock and then it officially kicks off at last yet last night was 6 45 so okay so let's get started uh wi 6r here at the top of the list take it dave and then hand it over to uh bob ak six our club you get a certain amount of time we're not timed but you know the longer the list is you're not crossing over each other's speech you can't talk and listen at the same time okay kettle corn i like regular popcorn i like to cook it in oil yeah the microwave stuff's junk so rose this is a total stranger i'm a straight my name's stranger i'm strange yeah peter we've just been hanging out for the last couple hours yeah he's bringing me in it's a long story i've lived in five countries five states but right now i live in florida did you when you were a child did your family move no i started moving after 17. oh yeah i'm like a nomadic minded free spirited september 27th libra what about you i'm aquarius you know i was adopted and i never found out till i was 45 the time i was born so i had my chart done somehow and i read it i was like i don't think that's me then i read it a week later and went yeah that's me [Laughter] yesterday this is great wow this is so so rose lives in the dance hall dance hall are you used to being married to jim twice twice you've been married to jim jim is over here you're bringing them popcorn that you don't like okay that's what happens after two times which my whole outfit is dressed from the free table the free table is a table that you can kind of see at the post office where if you don't want it you leave it there and if somebody else wants it they take it so you're from big sur yeah how do you like it here compared to there um it depends on my mood um my kids live up in nevada city grass valley that's where i i really love yeah um but i came here for the pandemic and it's a real blessing that's for sure oh you're just removed from society totally but i get like a maserati in neutral i go up there different times you get a maserati no i'm like a maserati neutral when i'm out here too long i'm like get me out yeah and then and a lot of us do a maserati in neutral i like that i've never heard that that's a good one and a lot of us do i've got my house in simi valley i can go to and go to the health food store go to the fresh fish market you can get fresh fish out here yeah and i'll come back and i'll buy fresh fish for other people yeah you know i'll shop for tamara i'll shop for die i'll shop with me a lot of people here are reclusive you may see them twice a year right walking walking down the streets there's no one out and about oh yeah usually there's some one thing is there aren't that many people here yeah everybody's here 30 full-time yeah 30 full-time residents yeah we were actually neighbors up in lake tahoe lived basically right a quarter mile away yeah didn't know small world where you ended up here i ended up in florida there's never anything for sale so nobody wants to leave here interesting because the mold mining towns everyone wanted to leave once the money ran out but here but that's history they love it here and um obviously there's some inconveniences like if you are out of food you have to at least make a 70 mile round trip to lone pine oh wow that's not much of a market that's the closest grocery stores grocery store 70 round trip wow and it's not much of a market every once in a while i run out of the stuff that i can't even get at the lone pine market and like i did last week i made a 200 mile round trip up to bishop where there's a vaughn supermarket you can get anything there produce and fruit you must have a problem with out here you mastered the fine art of of preserving fruits and produce uh i'll show you one of the you're canning one of the way you can can i'm too lazy but one of the things that i found are these they're activated charcoal with some other magic stuff in there and they absorb ethylene gases that fruits and produce produce to tell them to ripen the water comes from a springs about six and a half miles away and it goes to the treatment plant well the little tank that receives the untreated water sprung a leak and we contacted the state and this has been ongoing now for over two and a half years and they still don't have a plan so where does the water come from well we have water but it's not treated that's your truck and you can see that the bed is full of water oh yeah and so what i would do is uh drive the truck to the plant then a forklift comes out puts the pallet of water in here the truck squats down about an inch and a half i drive back to i just back it up to the post office and people take water and when the water's all gone i drive it back to my house not much crime out here right there's no crime in town there's uh people doing drugs and methamphetamine is popular in small towns and in this town too no i i don't i i don't think anybody a lot of drinking going on here but i don't think anybody's um no fentanyl yet hopefully not as far as i i hope as far as i know and i hope not that's funny rose has been married twice to the same guy to the same guy and then she brings him the popcorn she doesn't like and he buys her a house there are no stereotypes here and if there are they're quickly quickly quashed so with that said people can as long as they're respectful and cool from any ideology can can feel included here if they're cool and nice sure yeah i walk down to the circle people go hiking out there how are you doing great this is the resting princess if you stand far enough back uh-huh you can see the head and the breasts the resting princess okay and what you can't see is her two knees because we're too close to the hill that's behind this one what's on the top there is that a cross no it's just joshua oh joshua trees listen he's a perfect guy to shoot him around okay too much talking actually has a name from the greek it's called logaria logos meaning word and rhea meaning yeah repetitive of the mouth i was going to say get a lot of pictures of all the donkey okay because then you can oh i had a joke at the end of that is it as good as your lamborghini together or there was some joke i was going to say with that yeah i don't know no your maserati joke was good and that was not mine i've been saying that for years the mission i've given myself is to try to understand and express aspects of human nature aspects of what makes us human i use human form a lot but not exclusively this sculpture is um is a sculpture called uh eros pompeii the concept of it is the idea of sudden irreversible change like pompeii was just in an instant or you know sure you know in a brief moment their whole existence was wiped out uh yeah but we have it in our lives in terms of winning the lottery or falling in love or having an auto accident or an illness things that you don't plan but things that that direct the course of your life hmm can i ask what it would have been your big a roast pump face well um like how did you end up here that seems like whatever was being born to the the most perfect appearance who were just nurturing and loving taking a trip through big sur i went into the descents where rose just mentioned you'd been there yep for a cup of coffee and was there ten years it's a little bit of a story but it just changed the direction of my life you met someone having a cup of coffee and that change he and i had coffee together he was the only one in the restaurant at the time i walked in in the middle of the day and he fixed coffee for me and uh we talked i was on my way just had just left berkeley taking some time off from uh working at my dad's bookstore and he offered me a job so i said no you know i can't i'm just on my way he said um why don't you just stay three days and you can help me out and uh anyone who's your uh hurts your trip at all and i said yeah okay you're right i never left it changed the direction of my life and instead of staying in the bookstore i wound up being partially a writer and mostly a sculptor [Music] this is the town hall and this is where we have our potluck parties it has a kitchen with a stove and running water and a microwave and a piano which people which is kept in tuned by a guy named piano dan who comes to town where's piano dan come from he comes up from southern california somewhere oh well i'm not a penis records it's out of tune [Music] do you think there's a lot of boredom here there can be uh if you're connected with engaged with the world via the internet um and you have projects to do if you have hobbies to do which i ham radio photography music reading watching a good movie from time to time uh i'm never bored for some reason boredom strikes me in the middle of the day i'll take a nap us retired guys get to do that it has been said and windy like this you can hear the wind coming 30 miles away yeah everything just sort of stands still i like very much the open expanse of space the wildness around the town the fact that there's only a few people that live here the idea that you have so much personal freedom every day whatever you want to do if you're self-motivated it's fantastic maybe everybody wouldn't feel this way about out here yeah maybe people would feel restricted out here or limited you have to bring something with you here because this place is probably not going to fill all your needs but for someone with my um direction in life it's perfect it has a natural expansion it has a natural sense of freedom there's not a lot of um rules and regulations going on here we work with all the regular rules and laws of california right united states and so forth but at the same time um everything's pretty relaxed here what is that whiskey rebellion flag okay in 1791 the government uh just brand new uh imposed excise tax on farmers american farmers in those days had a side product all the time of whiskey they all made whiskey and sold it they put excise tax on it okay and the farmers didn't like it at all and they had actually formed a resistance to this tax and they were not going to pay it george washington who was president had to lead a militia of something like 7 000 people to suppress this uh air whole area that way around pittsburgh where philadelphia wherever it was and overthrow the suppression of not paying everybody had to pay attacks that was it do you make whiskey or you just love the flag all right i just i like the flag very much that's cool it's 13 stars i like to fly it as an expression of discontent with the government i mean i'm not rebellious i'm not rebelling but i wish the government was better in america the the congress should have the same medical plan as the rest of the country they tell everybody to do this but they do that which is you know i mean it's just not not right mark twain once said there's no distinct criminal class in the united states except for congress it hasn't changed it may have gotten worse but it hasn't he has said a lot of things humanism that have not changed you're a bit libertarian out here oh i don't think we have any any labels at all i think you just find a lot of different opinions where do you vote where would you vote by mail okay where did you vote before that was possible i voted by mail since 1964. ah i thought voting by mail was a new thing no no rural places it's an old thing voting by mail yeah because the precinct's too far away you can vote by mail for uh for any reason in california into the saloon so i when i moved in i noticed huh well this room has it has a toilet drain in the in the cement slab and then you notice this room this one has a toilet drain in the slab too and this one is bigger why would anybody want to build two restrooms right next to each other and i thought ladies room men's room what do you do after you've been in a saloon for a while you'd go visit the say your house was a saloon i'm not sure and the house is way older than anybody else's memory in town that was an ice locker before electricity came to okay the town had no electricity until 1970. oh wow the mine had electricity and the mine in i think 1924 they they put their own transmission line in all the way to lone pine but they owned it and they were not interested in getting into the electricity business for the residents of where there were a lot more residents back then because the mine was operating how many bars were here back in the day uh i think when the silver mine was booming it was on the order of 20 saloons and i remember reading i think in mark twain's book roughing it if you've read that book i have it deals with this area but somewhere in that book i think he says uh generally one can determine the character of a town by the ratio of saloons to churches jim are you gonna fix this one up here you gonna do something here no it's um it's shading that part of this the property that's all as someone who does sculpture you have to admire this street streamline modern style right [Music] i think it's the gas service coming up for max it's the gas service who knows you ever seen the movie it's on netflix no man be up no men beyond this point no i should i see it i think every man should see it okay and your lady or your wife or whoever she is she'll like it she will leave it'll change you forever all right i'm writing it down no man beyond this point [Music] and this is gordon newell yeah he made this sculpture and his son he built this as a monument for his father okay after his dad died he's he gordon used to live in that house up there okay this space is used in many ways uh you can uh we had a wedding they have had a wedding here they've had performers here uh mime troupe that yeah i mean we have dances here it's lovely some spontaneous things like this okay i'll see you in a while okay okay you two are so cute oh yeah the two are so cute i've only had one fight in 30 years but you've been divorced twice by a sports choice and he has a pretty well-known sculpture in front of the white house doesn't he oh wow so in this town the edge here that's government land yes the town side is 80 acres and surrounded by government land surrounded by blm lab and also that land down there is part of the enormous china lake naval weapons center and there's a fence all the way around it okay so bureau of land management owns all of this all the landscape that you see all around so no growth can happen not really the border at china lake naval weapon center runs east-west so it's border goes on a 45-degree diagonal and encompasses coso peak which is the highest one there yeah i don't know the border ends somewhere just just north of there we hear cannon shots coming from there sometimes you hear they're testing military hardware miles long it's a top-secret base uh we have permission to go on it because our our spring is on the navy base our spring has been there since well forever but the town has been using us spring since 1875. so our water rice even for the navy didn't show up here and take that land over until the 30s 1930s but our water rights are so powerful that water ice in the united states are so powerful that the navy couldn't throw us off so if we're going out there we have to call the base commander you're supposed to have an id card and of course you have to have the key and then you call them when you get back what a cool guy yeah very talented too and that's and knowledgeable you know i made the comment that i think there's a higher than average percentage of people with college degrees here and that i mean that speaks to not everybody with a college degree is smart not everybody without one is dumb but uh i think it's a statement about the town so this was the old post office yeah the post office has been a few different places over the since the town's been in existence and these are the old style pumps where you had to pull up to the pump and you had to tell the gas station how many gallons you wanted oh yeah or else it would overflow so is a post office then a gas station wow so what they do is they turn the pump on and that red that glass cylinder would fill up oh yeah yeah well i think i can take six gallons today charlie charlie fills it up and then like wipes down your hood fills up the tires gives you a smile yeah the old days right yeah look at that joshua tree i love these things yeah they start right around this elevation huh yeah they're pretty picky the top of the road here new house was just delivered looks like a container house and then looking out to the valley quite a fascinating place i got really lucky today meeting up with max right off the go it could have gone the other way of not meeting anybody because the streets look like this one thing i did want to talk about too though during these last couple years especially in cities you know a lot of people are in their own sort of ghost towns as in their own apartments locked up everything delivered sort of removed from the rest of society and it got me thinking like yeah this is a somewhat of a ghost town or however you want to call it removed from society town but in a way in a way this might be a far stretch in a way they're more connected than a lot of people living in big cities and separate apartments that have really um you know because of the internet can work from home completely do not have to leave their apartment for the first time in their lives and what is more secluded there you go i'll leave it at that thanks for coming along on this journey this very beautiful part of the country and another angle in to a special culture until the next one [Music] you

Channel: Peter Santenello

Views: 696,912

Keywords: real stories, real stories documentary, full length documentaries, darwin california documentary, darwin, california, ghost town, death valley, desert, lone pine, owens valley, travel, history, discovery, abandoned, exploration, exploring, isolated community, peter santenello, abandoned town, california ghost town, abandoned ghost town, abandoned towns, mojave desert, abandoned ghost town in california desert, death valley national park, alternative living

Id: m9_qwKD3euY

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 03 2022