Inside California’s Largest Ghost Town
Eagle Mountain was once home to 4,000 residents, complete with an elementary, middle, and high school, medical facilities, a shopping center, and eight churches. But by the 1980s, all the residents were forced to leave, a fence around the town was put up, and it was closed for good. Ever since, it has been frozen in time, like no other in the country.
I first came across Eagle Mountain while casually looking through Google Earth imagery of the California desert. I was hoping to find some neat desert spring, mine shaft, or, if I was lucky, a lonely cabin or two. Instead, I found what looked to be an entire sprawling town, as if someone had plopped down a Phoenix subdivision halfway between LA and Arizona, and promptly forgot about it.
I was immediately intrigued. Apparently there was some remote settlement that I somehow unwittingly passed on my many drives in the area. But something seemed off. There was no green grass, no sparking pools in the backyards, and not a single car in the driveway. Clearly, it had been abandoned for decades.
So I set off with a friend of mine, with a Jeep loaded down with supplies, and a vague sense that this was not going to be the walk in the park that the well preserved cul-de-sacs might imply.
Sure enough, around five miles from the town, we hit a wall. Quite literally, too. There was a large pumping station surrounded by an imposing barbed-wire fence directly on the road to Eagle Mountain.
So we weighed our options, and decided to just walk to the town through the open desert, far enough away from the prying eyes of the caretakers and water plant workers to remain unnoticed.
But where were we headed, anyway?
Eagle Mountain was a Wild West mining town, built 50 years after the West officially stopped being wild. Opened in 1948, it was constructed with the sole purpose of housing the miners employed at the local iron ore mine, who would have otherwise had to commute nearly 100 miles. The Eagle Mountain mine quickly became the largest in Southern California, producing well over 100 million tons of ore in the relatively brief time it was in operation. The town would eventually blossom into an almost normal community, complete with all the amenities of any mid-century California town, even sporting its own auditorium and swimming pool.
Eagle Mountain was not a normal community, though. It was a company town through and through, and not a single property on its grounds actually belonged to its residents. Everything was owned by Kaiser Steel, and the moment Kaiser Steel decided that the mine was no longer profitable, they simply made everyone leave and closed the gates.
We finally got to the town maybe 2 hours into our hike. The late May heat coupled with the rough terrain had exhausted us (and our water supply), but we made it.
The houses ranged in condition from completely dilapidated, to shockingly well-preserved. Some had large gaps in the walls, boarded up windows, and floors covered in debris, while others seemed almost untouched since the 1950s, absent a heavy coat of dust. The layout was almost identical in every house — each was a humble single story bungalow, with a kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms.
We kept walking deeper towards the mine itself, when we came across something far more surprising. Two rows of tall barbed wire fence, and behind them, a fully functioning prison!
It turns out Eagle Mountain had an even more colorful history than I thought.
A few years after the mine itself had closed, the California Department of Correction converted the old shopping center into a state prison for upwards of 400 unlucky guests. True to the Kaiser Steel fashion, the prison was privately owned and operated, with apparently very little supervision from the state.
As we walked towards the old guard post at the entrance we seemed to have jumped 30 years ahead in Eagle Mountain’s history. This section looked far less dilapidated. There was an old calendar on the wall, dating to 2003. Eerier still, a “police academy of 2003” mug sat undisturbed on the table, complete with a brown coffee residue, next to a dust-covered jacket.
Clearly something had happened in that year to make the state shut down the prison in quite a hurry. Here, the story takes a darker turn.
On October 25th, 2003, Eagle Mountain Correctional Facility experienced a violent prison race riot, one that led to the lethal stabbing of two black prisoners. The riot broke out over a viewing of the 2003 World series, and shortly after, the facility staff were overwhelmed. The guards had apparently called for reinforcements, but seeing as the nearest other prison was over 60 miles away, help came far too late. By the time the dust had settled, two prisoners were dead, seven others critically injured, and dozens more hurt. The prison was promptly shut down.
By this point in our trip, the sun was setting, and our water supplies, already critically low, had run out. It was time to turn back. So we waddled down the lonely road back to the highway, hoping that the water plant workers would take some pity on us and let us through. They did not. We got back to the facility after midnight, and I gathered up the courage to ask the attendants to open the gates. Perplexed, they asked “do you have an official invitation? This is private property.” We did not. The confused guard merely said that we shouldn’t be there, and promptly hung up.
We eventually did get back to the car. It took another hour-long detour up and down the mountain, but we got across. Exhausted and now in the throws of dehydration, we got in our car and drove off, not planning on returning any time soon.
But the story doesn’t end there. Desert stories rarely have definitive and conclusive endings, after all. The state of California still couldn’t quite decide on what to do with the old town. In the late 1980s, and again in early 2000s, there was a proposal to turn Eagle Mountain into a large landfill, but repeated lawsuits killed that plan. By 2010, another proposal was drafted to convert the mine into a hydroelectric station, but that, too, was stopped following harsh criticism by the nearby Joshua Tree National Park.
The town was also repeatedly used as a backdrop for multiple Hollywood movies and TV shows, including multiple appearances on the BBC’s Top Gear, and, more recently, on Christopher Nolan's 2020 film, “Tenet.” It appears I was not the only one entranced by this nearly-forgotten piece of California history.
In a final turn, just last year Eagle Mountain was purchased for a whopping 22.5 million dollars by a secretive company named “Ecology Mountain Holdings,” based out of Cerritos, California. Little else is known about the corporation, or even the reason for the purchase.
Whatever their plans for the place, I sure hope it works out better for them than it did for the last owners. Eagle Mountain could use some good news for a change.
