strange-geographies

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Strange Geographies: Village Life in Vanuatu

I've written a lot about strange places in the U.S. this year -- an airplane graveyard in the desert; a mock Iraqi village in the suburbs of San Diego; a town killed by a modern-day dustbowl two hours north of Los Angeles. But the strangest place I've ever been -- the strangest and most beautiful, I should say -- is a developing nation 1000km northeast of Australia, populated by the friendliest former cannibals you'll ever meet, called Vanuatu. I wrote about it a little bit back in April, right after I... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Portugal's Bone Chapel

I spent a few weeks in Portugal during the spring of 2006, and one of the most striking things about its many churches and chapels and religious monuments was, well, how dark they were. Not literally -- there was plenty of light. But it seemed like every statue of Christ was weeping blood, and every church had a display case of gruesome relics in the foyer; a saint's pickled eyeballs here, a toe with dessicated skin still clinging to it there. But of all these monuments to pain and death, nothing could... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: the Forgotten High School of Goldfield, Nevada

At the turn of the last century, Goldfield was a mining boomtown -- prospectors were pulling millions of dollars worth of ore out of the ground each year, and with a population that ballooned to more than 30,000 by 1904, it was the largest town in the state of Nevada. It was a classic Old West success story: gun-slinging heroes like Wyatt Earp trod its wooden sidewalks, and in a society where the real measure of a town's worth was its bar-and-whorehouse scene, Goldfield had the rest beat: Tex Rickard's... READ ON

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Desolation Vacation: Mina, Nevada

There are few landscapes in the United States lonelier than that of western Nevada. Towns -- remote outposts connected by endless, thin ribbons of highway -- are named for what miners used to pull out of the ground: Coaldale, Silverpeak, Goldfield. But the mining industry in places like Mineral County has largely disappeared, and with it, the towns it gave birth to. Those that aren't ghost towns already cling precariously to life, burned-out and abandoned structures at their margins creeping inexorably... READ ON

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California's Weirdest Rocks: The Tufa

California can boast many superlatives: it contains the lowest point in the continental USA, the tallest, largest and oldest trees in the world, and it is the most populous state in the country. But to my mind, it also deserves the title of Home of the Weirdest Rocks, and it owes that honor to one rock in particular: the tufa. Essentially, it's a common rock -- limestone -- that forms in uncommon circumstances -- underwater. When calcium-rich underwater springs mix with lakewater rich in carbonates, a... READ ON

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The Last Best Ghost Town: Bodie, California

There are a thousand ghost towns spread across the western United States -- a whole constellation of loss and ruin -- but most are little more than foundations, or at best a few tumbledown shacks, or if the people who lived and died there did anything of note, and if they're lucky, a sun-faded commemorative plaque mounted on a squat stone pillar. The ghost town of Bodie, however, is another story altogether. A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By... READ ON

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Manzanar: America's Concentration Camp

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government imprisoned more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans in remote camps spread across the Western states, far from their homes, for more than three years. They were allowed to bring little with them. Shopkeepers had to shutter their businesses. Farmers either had to sell their land in great haste and at a great loss, or trust neighbors to work their land while they were gone; many returned to find their farms stolen. In the years since Japanese... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: Ghost Towns of California

I live in Los Angeles. I moved here in 2002 from a smaller, saner part of the country to go to film school and work, a lifestyle which became so all-consuming that for my first two or three years here, this sprawled-out behemoth of a city was all I knew of California. When you spend all your time hemmed inside its concrete borders, it's easy to imagine LA's low-slung jungle extending forever in all directions -- but it doesn't. Drive two hours to the north or the east and you'll find yourself in some of... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: The Little Town That Los Angeles Killed

There are lots of dry lake beds in California, and to the untrained eye, Owens Dry Lake is just like the rest. But there is one key difference: while most of the state's stark, white alkali flats have been dry for thousands of years, Owens was an enormous, gem-blue lake stretching more than a hundred miles square -- and an important habitat for millions of migratory birds -- as recently as 1917. That's when the City of Los Angeles stole it, diverting the streams that fed Owens Lake into an aqueduct that... READ ON

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Strange Geographies: A Utopian Ghost Town in the California Desert

Llano del Rio is one of the most distinctive ghost towns in the United States. Like many Utopian communities, it lasted only a short time -- a few hopeful, productive years -- before being abandoned. Unlike most, however, it was built to last -- its granite foundations sourced from nearby mountain ranges -- and, still in the middle of nowhere even 90 years after it was inhabited, it's been allowed to linger on, a monument to the disappeared past on the edge of a vast... READ ON