Desert Ghosts

A few of the I-15's epic fails

This weekend Ricky and I headed east to Vegas, mainly to visit a friend who just moved there. While we were there, we managed to get in a visit to the Zak Bagans Haunted Museum, which gives you a delightfully macabre 2 1/2-hour tour for your money, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The guides are skilled at telling stories, if you’re a Zak Bagans fan you’ll get plenty of video of him, and some of the artifacts are genuinely incredible. My favorites: Ed Gein’s iron cauldron, the “roots” dybbuk box, and a little doll called Noma who was supposed to be incredibly evil and who I thought was just adorable.

Us, in the reception area of the Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum. If I look a bit red-faced and damp, it’s probably because we’d just come in from the 105-degree heat outside.

If you’ve never driven from L.A. to L.V., most of the route takes you east along Interstate 15 through desert landscapes. Seriously, between Barstow and Primm (at the state border) there isn’t much beside Joshua trees, brown hills, and the occasional half-abandoned settlement.

But I was intrigued by some of the latter, so I kept notes and did some research when I got home. I’ve always loved the desert; as a Southern California native (who owns an inherited and completely useless piece of property near the Salton Sea), I grew up seeing it on a lot of trips. I am fascinated by the life that springs up without (much) water, and by the incredible shapes it sometimes bends itself into.

Some of these roadside areas, though, speak directly to human failure. Let’s look at five in particular (arranged in order as you head south from Vegas along the 15):

1. Primm - Primm is that weird little place that straddles both the 15 and the Nevada/California border, meaning on one side you can throw your money away in slots and on the other you can toss it to Lotto tickets. To me, it will always be State Line, the name it held until 1996, when it was named after the fellow who started the whole thing in the ‘50s. Over the years it acquired casinos, hotels, and an actual roller coaster, and for a while it seemed like it was booming…until it wasn’t. Whiskey Pete’s and Buffalo Bill’s, the two casino/hotels whose signage dominates the area, both closed in the last few years, leaving that coaster looking especially ghostly. A shopping mall is almost completely empty; even smaller businesses like truck stops are closed. I’m not sure what happened to Primm to cause its crash-and-burn, but it makes for a suitable beginning to the stretch of dead-or-dying heading south out of Vegas.

2. The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility - Just beyond Primm, you’ll spy some tall towers with incredibly bright lights atop them towering over fields of blue and gray. This is the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, which when it opened in 2014 was the world’s largest solar thermal power facility, but is now a testament to obsolete technology. If you notice a haze around those towers, that’s because this place still operates on a system that uses mirrors to channel sunlight onto boilers, creating steam that powers turbines. Well, solar technology’s come a long way in the last decade, and this place was supposed to shut down in 2026, but the California Public Utilities Commission gave Ivanpah a stay of execution.

3. Zzyzx - It turns out this is more than just a road with an unpronounceable name in the middle of freaking nowhere (somewhere between Primm and Baker). A guy named Curtis Howe Springer set up a health spa in this spot back in 1944, and just made up a name that he thought would be the last one in any reference book. He got that part right, but it turns out Springer was a grifter who made up a fake hot springs and squatted illegally on the land, and the Feds kicked him out in 1974. What makes Zzyzx interesting now is that it’s home to a pond amusingly known as Lake Tuendae; somehow this artificial water feature has become home to an endangered fish known as the Mojave tui chub.

4. Baker - I used to enjoy driving through Baker because it sported huge signs for the intriguingly-named eatery Bun Boy (closed since 2013), which hosted “the world’s tallest thermometer” (this thing is 134 feet tall, that size chosen in honor of the hottest day ever recorded in Death Valley). For a while, entrepreneurs tried to build Baker up as “the gateway to Death Valley,” but as these visionaries died off, so did Baker, which is now largely a collection of abandoned businesses. The thermometer still works, though; on the day (May 11) we drove past, it read 109° (my dashboard temperature was 108°). Thank heavens for the car’s AC.

5. Early Man Site - Okay, this one’s pretty much the biggest scam on the 15, and it’s kind of amusing that it’s an official state sign that calls attention to it. Located near the Calico Ghost Town, its sad little tale goes back to the 1940s, when some amateur geologists found little bits of stone that looked like they could have been manufactured tools. These artifacts were found in what was once the shores of Lake Manix, before that dried up 18,000 years ago. Enter Ruth Simpson, an archaeologist who showed some of the possible tools to Louis Leakey, the science megastar who excavated the most famous early human remains from Olduvai Gorge in Africa. In 1963 Leakey opined that the little sharp rocks were “unquestionably” made by human hands. However, in 1980, carbon dating revealed these rocks were 200,000 years old, meaning there’s pretty much no way they could’ve been made by early man…because there was no early man around this area then. Combine that with the fact that no human remains have ever been discovered there, and that freeway sign seems a bit presumptuous. However, excavation of the area continues, so maybe one day that sign will be right after all.

Let’s close this out with a spot located on the Pearblossom Highway west of the 15 that was NOT failing but was in fact just as fun as I remembered from a long-ago visit: Charlie Brown Farms, a massive tourist trap that claims to have “world famous date shakes” (having consumed one, I will say it was DANG good), to say nothing of a veritable cornucopia of jerky, fudge, nuts, pickles, honey, Funko Pop figures, toys, and full-size dinosaurs (outside). Ricky grabbed coffee and jerky, and I went home with German Chocolate Fudge and Tennessee Whisky Fudge (I love that these each come with built-in little plastic servers).

From Charlie Brown Farms, it was a short forty minutes’ drive home. That date shake was the perfect end to a long, hot drive across a desert full of mistakes and scams.