Trona, California Abandoned Desert Town Documentary with Train "Balloon"

here we are in the middle of nowhere California in the Searles Valley now the town way in the background there is called Trona many people think Trona is a ghost town it is not other people think it's an abandoned Town it is not is it a thriving Town it is not at least not in the traditional sense but the people of Trona have a spirit about them that's pretty unbelievable I mean it seems like the worst place in the world to live and yet the people there are proud of their town now in the distance you can see the Searles Valley Mining Company it was a large operation many years ago we're going to do a little flyover of the town and while we're doing that I'm just going to give you a little bit of history on the town first white folks came through here in about 1850 they SOB way out on the lake there that there's a lot of mineral deposits in including borax which was a desirable commodity at that time and the first guy through here with Borax himself and he was searching for gold and so he saw that there was borax here but he kind of had gold on his mind so he skipped over it later this guy's Searles came through in the later 1800s 1880 or something but he staked a claim and he claimed this uh this lake bed here and then he started mining the borax and some minerals out of there and it wasn't until about 1916 that the railroad was put in and this very large Plant and at that time it was a huge operation and at one point there was something like 4 000 workers at the plant so uh you can imagine the population here could have easily been 10 or 20 000 people and now the mining company is still in operation however it's a greatly reduced staff it's nothing like it used to be as a result there's many many many abandoned houses and the place looks pretty rough generally speaking the people there are proud of their town they like it they keep it clean I've seen people walking around picking up litter and they try to make it look good as good as it's going to be so let's go explore and check it out and see what we find foreign [Music] of town Southwest I guess it is at the old uh easy serve behind me which you can see is been abandoned for many years I think there's a gas stations to stop at and this would be just as you get into town and then over here is a shop Workshop car repair shop it's a diesel repair Lube jobs eight cylinder tune-up 39.95 so that was a while ago so we Flew Over the uh the West End plant and you could see what that facility is like you could also see out in the valley there's a little bit of water out there where I think we have some maybe a little bit of rain recently there's a whole bunch of different minerals they get from the lake and you know back in the old days it was kind of like borax was kind of the thing and then there's potash and soda ash and Trona is the name of the town is actually a mineral in its in its own right so there's these various salt minerals extractable from the lake I'm not really sure exactly what the plant is focusing on whether they do several minerals or just one or two or whatever but anyway it's in operation and we're going to roll into town now and check that out behind me there you can see the Shell station and you can see on the end of it it says authentic Mexican food there used to be a little Mexican uh got a restaurant thing in there and they would serve up really great burritos and stuff and I used to stop when I would pass through here in the kind of the mid late 2000s so this one hasn't been closed for that long but it is closed and in the back you can see a lot of abandoned homes back there okay so now we're at the East end of town and over behind me that way is the What's called the Searles Valley minerals Trona facility I'm going to show you the sign right here so this is on one side of the road then across the road is the facility and you can see that that one is definitely in operation you can see the steam coming out [Music] foreign [Music] right across the street where I am from the uh the Trona plant right there there's this sort of picnic area with bathrooms and whatnot and this is kind of an example of how Trona can be at once a sort of decaying town but also a place where people care about stuff this area is nice and clean and there's a bunch of information over here about the cereals Valley minerals just tons of information it's actually you know nearly 150 years of Innovations and Mining John Cheryl's mind the first borax from Cyril's Lake dry lake in 1873. okay there's borax V board pyro bore boric acid soda ash anhydrous sodium sulfite biocarb salt oh here's a timeline cool 1850 in January the Jayhawker Briar and Bennett Arcane groups passed through Searles Valley their escape from Death Valley 1862 John Searles prospects starts mining gold and silver in the slight Range mountains with three Partners used borax and soda easily gathered from the dry Baron surface of what is now soils like to refine his oars however the value of the borax goes unrecognized anyway this is just a whole timeline here yeah so if you want to learn about the Mining Company this is the place to do it right here the railway was it was a big deal so it's just the volume of this stuff is huge so it used to be a way to get it out of here oh and here's some Wildflower information which is cool here's Mr Searles himself all right well you history Buffs probably enjoyed that I don't know about the rest of you but I think that's pretty cool it is uh late December right now so the weather is like really wonderful come here in the summertime it's uh entirely different story there's some uh OHV spokes coming through we use the facilities or whatever [Music] foreign [Music] some of these places are really bad but they're actually looks like they're being lived in I hear some that cheer you up [Music] in pretty good shape and they've taken the time to decorate it very cool this can't be all bad he's got a hot tub right another thing that Trona is renowned for is it's high school football team for a somewhat dubious reason and that is that their football field which is right behind me there you can see the lights for the nighttime playing uh the football field is entirely dirt there's no grass whatsoever it's just hard Dusty dirt so these kids play on this dirt they practice on it and the hot days I just can't imagine it and I can imagine though that when their opponents come and play them uh they probably have a pretty big home field advantage I imagine if you're used to playing on grass that would be a little bit difficult to uh play on this stuff now one of the reasons is is that the water here in Trona is all piped in from Ridgecrest so water is really precious here so they really don't see any vegetation in people's yards they just it's just not practical to uh use water for that the water has to be used for for drinking and cooking and cleansing that's the reason now you might ask why they don't put some artificial turf down well I don't know it's maybe it's a budgetary thing but you would think that the plant could kick in for a artificial turf but I also have heard that they actually they take pride now in the fact that they play on the dirt and they don't want to uh change that but there's been news stories on them from all over the country about this football team and the way they play on the dirt so I think they just want to keep it that way oh and it also needs to be mentioned that the name of the team is the Trona tornadoes I can only imagine that some of their opponents would rather weather a tornado than play on this dirt field but got to get him credit they're pretty tough okay I'm on the north end of town and you can see behind me there is uh the T on the side of the hillside for Trona and then this kiosk here in this bear space here is actually a cemetery that's not occupied yet and then behind me behind me now the other side of the street is the actual cemetery and then behind that if you look at the train cars down there you can see they kind of curve around and trained people call that a balloon and so when the train tracks come into the Trona plant the Searles Valley mineral plant they take this big loop it's a huge Loop and what that enables them to do is to avoid any switching of cars you know they don't have to unhook the cars and pull locomotives around and do all that stuff it just makes a big circle and they come in and get loaded up and go go right out I'm currently walking around the cemetery in Trona and I'm struck by a couple of things one is there seems to be a mix of people who either died quite Young only made it to 20 or 30 or 40. mixed in along with a lot of people who seem to live quite long lives and those seem to be the older the older generation so I don't know if they've had some trouble with you know drug addiction or alcoholism or whatever as they often do and places like this you know my fellow YouTuber I'm a big fan of hers named Wonder Hussey she called this the Detroit of the desert which is true in the sense that you know there's once big the you know the plant here employed a lot of people and that kind of died down but you know it's uh it is a lot of abandoned houses cheap real estate and all that but along with Detroit you know Detroit there are people from Detroit who are really proud of their city and trying to make it make it a lot better and we definitely have that going on here in Toronto so anyway thanks for coming along for the ride if you did enjoy the video I would really appreciate uh subscribe and uh thumbs up like because there will be a lot more great videos I plan to produce kind of Adventure style like this so you know learning about cool places and all that so anyway until next time thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Fiesta Adventures

Views: 289,537

Keywords: #wonderhussy, #wonderhussyadventures, Trona, ghost town, abandoned town, Death Valley

Id: dDT_Vdf-GSE

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023