A sense of foreboding overtook me as I gazed across the miles of salt flats. I am not one to have those feelings, but there was something here, as I walked out onto the mushy lakebed that unnerved me.
As if on cue, my right boot sunk into the whitish muck nearly to my ankle. Then, just as suddenly, my other boot sunk knee high into the goo.
Normally, that wouldn’t bother me, except I was still inside those boots. Suddenly, I had images of Lot’s wife, and I too would turn into a pillar of salt.
How would Laureen accept the news that her adventurous husband had somehow got himself buried in a thousand feet of wet mushy salt all alone?
Not being able to think of an appropriate answer, I carefully and with humility, backtracked to a drier piece of earth – still wearing the boots. They had not been sucked off me, like they once had been at Mono Lake – but that tale is for another time.
I found myself at the ghost town of Saltdale, twelve miles northeast of California City, along the Redrock Randsburg Road, and ghostly it was.
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| Saltdale rail siding |
There is nothing left but a few housing slabs, blocks of cement, abandoned railroad tracks stretching across and into Koehn Lake, and the feeling that this place once was inhabited by family and friends.
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| Remnants of a house |
I enjoy traveling. But sometimes, when exploring communities that no longer exist, there are questions about the place that come to mind along with the understanding there will be no satisfactory answers coming.
What happened to the people? Where did they go? Did they give-up on their dreams of success and just move away? Did they find happiness again, eventually?
Perhaps it was being mired in the endorheic lake for a few moments, which allowed my mind to wander rather pointedly toward the population that once resided beside this large empty lake.
Koehn Lake is also referred to as a sink lake or terminal lake. Simply put, it is a body of water with nowhere for the water to exit. There are no streams or rivers that run from it or to it. Thus, the water evaporates, often leaving behind large deposits of saline. Which in the case of Koehn Lake, was a money-making opportunity for those wishing an almost endless supply of salt within the Fremont Valley.
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| Dry Koehn Lake |
The Mohave Desert has lots of ghost towns, and Saltdale happens to one of many – but it wasn’t always so.
In 1914, mining of the salt located in Koehn Lake, named after Charles Koehn, began by the Consolidated Salt Company.
It turns out, there is a very interesting tale of claim jumping, gun play, and general shenanigans when it came to all the mining that was to go around this lake of salt at the time and the following decades to come. The whole drama is better suited for a Netflix series, then here in this column, since it gets rather complicated on who did this and who did that. I’d be tired by the time it was all written in chronological order.
Like being stuck in mud, being tired is not fun.
In 1913, the Consolidated Salt Company was formed, and in 1914 a crushing and screening plant was built, along with a small-gauge railroad track out into the dry lakebed. The mining results were amazing, with nearly two hundred and fifty tons of salt shipped out weekly by railroad cars. By the end of 1914, the total production was over twenty-thousand tons of processed salt.
Salt was very popular it seems, and still is.
“Do you want salt on your French fries,” a waitress may ask.
“And who doesn’t?” would be the response from an imaginary customer.
The production ran so high, that by 1915, the company was producing seven hundred and twenty tons a week and employed sixty-five workers to keep up with demand.
A post office opened in September of 1916 and the town of Saltdale was on its way to becoming mining boomtown.
But the Southern Pacific railroad could not supply enough cars to carry the salt. And that, is where the troubles first started. Because of the lack of cars, there was a delay in shipments up to five months.
This is what modern economists would refer to as a supply chain issue, and no one wanted to wait five months to salt their fries.
Then, like in many melodramas, ‘fake’ claims were discovered and filed in court over the right to mine salt.
Research showed more than a billion claims were filed over a few years and the production of the salt in the lake was divvied up between competing companies.
Between all the salt companies around the lake, over seventeen thousand tons of salt was processed in 1919.
In the same year, electric power was supplied to the mills and town by the Southern Sierras Power Company. The modern era had arrived.
More and more folks moved into the area and in 1920, the Saltdale School District was formed but very few students were enrolled. The students who did go to school, attended classes in the company’s office buildings in the beginning.
So, no official schoolhouse was built at the time.
“No, schoolhouse rocks for you!” the Superintendent may have yelled.
Production continued for years, but sometimes the rains did not, and the lake could no longer fill and evaporate leaving the salt deposits behind. The various salt companies would pump water into specific locations in Koehn Lake to induce the evaporation of the water but that was expensive and time consuming.
By 1924, only six men still worked at the Consolidated Salt Company.
And like many future ghost towns, Saltdale had its up and downs. Good wet seasons producing a bountiful of salt, and leaner drier years where production was minimal.
In the mid-twenties, a post office, gas station, grocery store, and a school were constructed along the Cantil-Randsburg Road.
There were local dances, picnics, dinners, and the more festivities making this a very friendly and safe community to reside in.
During the Great Depression, the town hung on but in the 1940s, gypsum was found in increasing amounts in the salt fields. This reduced the amount of pure salt being able to be processed and shipped out, thus continuing to reduce the number of workers at the various mills around the lake.
With the gypsum influx, and a few years of very low precipitation, Saltdale was on its way of becoming a ghost town.
The post office closed in June 1950 and the school district formally dissolved the following year.
One mill owned by the Long Beach Salt Company, was able to keep operations going through these tough times, but none of the four workers lived in Saltdale. In 1975, the United States Interior Board of Land Appeals decided all mining claims on Koehn Lake were null and void.
It was the final death knell for a town named Saltdale.
Standing beside the abandoned railroad tracks reaching out into Koehn Lake, made me imagine what it must have been like to work and live in this remote area of the Mojave Desert. Sure, a small town with family and friends, but the nearest hospital or emergency services were in Randsburg sixteen miles away over a rough dirt road.
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| Tracks to nowhere |
There is not much left to show where the school, post office, or other buildings were in Saltdale. The weather and the corrosive powers of the salt fields soon dispatched any remnants of the town. There is a section of railroad, near where a large modern platform had been built by the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1930s.
Not wanting to venture any further across the wet surface of the lake, I decided the usage binoculars and a drone were the only safe ways to get a deeper look into the surroundings. I did not want to take another chance of losing my boots or worse to the brine awaiting me if I left the comfort of a solid footing.
Perhaps another season would encase the ground into a hard packed surface, but since it had rained recently – these were the best possibilities to learn more of what happened to this once thriving community.
A rusting tin roof of a building two hundred yards offshore peaked out from the salt surrounding it. It was as though the structure itself had died and was slowly crumbling out of sight.
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| A sinking structure in the distance |
A wooden set of railroad ties, being eaten away by the environment crisscrossed along the lakebed. The rails long gone, but the proof of a busy time from the past was evident.
Clouds covered the skies and a new chance for rain looked imminent. It was time to call this adventure done.
As I made my way back over the dirt roads to the pavement, my thoughts once again ran back to when this town was alive and vibrant.
Perhaps that is why I visit such places. To remember.
