Got $5 million? You could own this sustainable "ghost town" in the Mojave Desert

In the Mojave Desert town of Nipton, the spirit of Western frontier has transformed a forgotten outpost into a self-sustaining ecotopia where the dream lives on.

Historic Hotel Nipton bed and breakfast.

By Dashka Slater
Sunset Magazine

One rule of Nipton living is that you never try to outshout the train. The noise might not seem so deafening closer to civilization, but in this Mojave Desert town, 60 miles south of Las Vegas, silence holds dominion. On my first visit there last year, I sat for a long while and heard nothing at all—no car, no airplane, no leaf blower, no barking dog, not a single human voice. The vast wordless desert surrounded me in all directions.

I’d arrived on a weekday, my rental car pinged by a shower of pebbles and grit as I motored down Nipton Road, which runs between Interstate 15 and the town of Searchlight, Nevada. Nipton was the only stop for miles, its existence marked by a wagon-mounted sandwich board that read:

WELCOME TO NIPTON, CA
B&B HOTEL & ECO-CABIN
STORE RV PARK & CAMPING
RESTAURANT

There were no people roaming the sidewalks because there were no sidewalks—or people, for that matter. A faded settlement of about 20 permanent residents, the town consisted of an assortment of structures, some solid and occupied, some as vacant and splintered as an Old West movie set. Gamers might know Nipton for its cameo in Xbox 360’s Fallout: New Vegas, where it played a post-apocalyptic wasteland infested by giant mantises. But otherwise it was your typical drive-through desert community, fixed at the crossroads of Nowhere Special and Wherever You Were Going. There was one notable exception: Nipton, and everything in it, was for sale.

Two weeks earlier I’d telephoned the town’s owner, an 83-year-old former gold miner named Gerald Freeman, known to everyone as Jerry. He purchased Nipton’s 80 acres in 1984, then spent the next 30 years slowly turning it into a desert ecotopia, where he did everything from plant trees to convert to biofuel to erect an 80-kilowatt solar plant that pumps the town with nearly half its power.

A future buyer with enough cash and the right sense of mission would get the deed to the whole thing—a town, yes, but also Jerry’s vision. “Nipton was where I realized my dream,” he told me. But time was running out. When we spoke, he’d just spent four months in the hospital with congestive heart and renal failures, and he was still getting his nutrition from a feeding tube. He was looking for someone to continue his work. Before we hung up, he invited me to Nipton, to come see his sustainable community up close.

And so there I was, standing outside the whitewashed adobe Hotel Nipton, gazing out at the knuckly brown mountains of the Ivanpah Range and imagining what it would be like to have your own little kingdom. Just as I was turning the thought over in my mind the first freight train came rumbling through, followed by a violent blast of horns and chiming bells. For 20 minutes the cacophony lasted. I wanted to remark on it, but it was too loud, and besides, there was no one around to hear me.

Jerry might own Nipton, but the day-to-day running of the place usually falls to Jim Eslinger. A former long-haul trucker with a drooping mustache and a bowie knife strapped to his hip, Eslinger serves as caretaker and hotelier of Hotel Nipton.

At the height of the season, the hotel receives a steady influx of desert ramblers and foreign tourists anxious for a whiff of the authentic Old West. But the day I was there, the only other visitors were a couple from Las Vegas on an overnight with their teenage niece. Eslinger made a bonfire behind the hotel. The blaze was huge, fed by an enormous tree stump and several sheets of plywood. Sparks flew up in great blizzards, hissing and crackling. The niece, already in her pajamas, watched it for a few minutes, then turned back inside in search of a Wi-Fi signal.

Eslinger had wandered through town eight years ago and never left. “I can’t even imagine living in a city now,” he said. “I’d rather put a bullet in my head and call it a day.” His needs were meager, but when our conversation turned to the latest Powerball mania sweeping the nation, he confessed a longing for the winning ticket.

“I’d buy Nipton,” he said flatly, throwing more combustibles on the fire. “And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

I was at the hotel lobby early the next morning, waiting for Jerry to arrive. These days, he and his wife, Roxanne Lang, spend most of their time in their home in Henderson, Nevada, about an hour away, because of his health. I thumbed through the scrapbooks stacked in the sitting area, each one stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings: “Owner of historic Nipton thinking big.” “Nipton developer has big plans.” “Nipton is his personal fiefdom.”

When Jerry arrived, he was pushing a wheeled walker, and despite obvious signs of declining health, he retained a quality of robust vitality. He wore a leather vest and sunglasses, and he had the same rough-hewn features of the man in the photographs from 30 years ago. He settled into a bentwood chair on the hotel’s wraparound porch and attached an oxygen tube to his nose, so that his breath didn't run out before his thoughts did.

Jerry was born in Hollywood in 1933 to a Russian Jewish family. He graduated from Caltech with a degree in geology and eventually founded a mineral exploration company. After some success, he invested in several gold mines in the Ivanpah Valley, but already he was looking for his next project.

And there was Nipton, just down the road from his mines—and it was for sale. The way Jerry saw it, the tiny outpost had everything you needed to build a self-sustaining community, including access to the sweet waters of the Pleistocene- era lake below its surface. He bought it for $200,000.

At first, Jerry wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the town. He originally envisioned Nipton as an artists’ colony, while his wife pitched the town as a movie location (a few films, including Breakdown, with Kurt Russell, were shot there). Neither idea bore much fruit. But soon the newly remodeled hotel filled up with desert pilgrims, and the trading post—stocked today with guidebooks, dry goods, and local crafts—brought in a steady income. Jerry tried to open a gas station but found it too expensive. He conceived a barbecue business, but that took too much time. So he constructed a greenhouse from which to sell potted poplars and Christmas trees, but there was little demand. Then, certain that a new gold rush was about to strike the Ivanpah Valley, he spent $50,000 building an assay house and convinced a mining company to locate its office there.

But the dream was larger than any one venture. It was as old as the West and as human as the first Homo sapiens who trekked across the Bab el Mandeb strait in search of a new home. It was the dream of starting over and of forging a new and simpler path. “We’ve got all the resources we need to do that,” Jerry told me. “We’ve got the water, we’ve got the sunshine that gives us the power. We have the ability to grow things and to build structures from the natural materials around us.”

“After considering Freeman’s enthusiastic boosterism for a couple of hours, a listener comes away with one of two impressions,” a reporter for the San Bernadino County Sun observed in 1986. “Either this guy has really done his homework and Nipton’s development is a venture of genius. Or, he’s gotten too much sun.”

In 1991, Jerry struck gold once again. The Nipton Trading Post was granted approval to sell tickets for the California State Lottery, making it one of the closest retailers to Las Vegas. (Nevada has no state lottery.) For a while it was the highest-volume lottery-ticket retailer in California, and even today it remains one of Nipton’s most important sources of income.

The previous afternoon I’d strolled into the trading post, where two Buddhist monks in saffron robes were filling out their tickets. One was tall and thick, the other as tiny as a 10-year-old. They didn’t speak much English, so our conversation consisted mostly of the word “lucky,” passed back and forth with various inflections. The big monk had recently won $1,700, which he used to purchase a new iPhone. He held the gadget out for me to admire: “Lucky!”

Once the lotto took off, so too did Jerry’s vision for a sustainable community. First he added a cluster of tented eco-cabins, outfitted with platform beds and wood-burning stoves. Popular with today’s 30-something crowd, the cabins were based on a design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Then, in 2010, he assembled a solar plant, which produces 40 percent of the town’s power. It sits on the outskirts behind a barbed wire fence, its rows of reflecting harvesters mirroring the sun as it moves across the sky.

Jerry’s next step, he said, was to build a hydrogen system in order to store clean energy. He described a visit he recently had from Phil Hawes, the architect for the Biosphere 2 project, who spoke to him about using Nipton as a kind of hands-on sustainable-design classroom for San Francisco Institute of Architecture students. (When I spoke to Hawes, he sounded downright Jerryesque, conjuring visions of Nipton as a self-supporting Eco Village of 2,000 souls.)

But all of these notions depended on the right kind of buyer stepping forward. Someone who saw Nipton as Jerry did. Someone to keep the dream alive. “I’d like to move forward in the direction I’m going,” Jerry said. “That heritage, that legacy, that thrust that began with the first settlers.”

The setting sun had painted the desert pink. The mountains solidified into silhouettes, hoarding the evening shadows. It was time for Jerry to head back to Henderson. Eslinger walked him to his car.

“Thanks for taking care of Nipton,” Jerry said, his eyes misty. Then he and Roxanne drove off toward the train tracks and disappeared over the horizon.

A few months later, I called him at his home in Henderson. He’d come down with a bout of pneumonia not long after my visit, and his voice was faint, with long pauses as he gathered air into his lungs. While his dream buyer had yet to materialize, he had found new operators for the cafe and was hiring a property management company to help run Nipton. A few new residents had moved to town, and he was in talks with someone who wanted to install a solar observatory. He was heartened by these signs of interest, he said, his voice growing stronger. They told him he was on the right path, and he planned to stick around long enough to see where that path would lead. “We’ll see what happens,” he said. “Life has so many crazy twists and turns, you hardly know what’s going to happen from one day to the next.”

Then last October, I got an email from Roxanne. It was brief without being terse: Jerry had died in her arms a few days earlier. He was buried at a cemetery in the Mojave Desert. The town of Nipton is still for sale.

A Ghost Town, Going Green

Mr. Freeman and his wife, Roxanne Lang, reopened the town’s store and cafe, and restored the hotel, room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

By DIANE CARDWELL
New York Times

NIPTON, Calif. — Gerald Freeman leaned on a walking stick on a dusty hill near the four rows of his solar arrays, talking about it like an apostle on a mission. Down the road are the eucalyptus trees he planted as a potential source of biomass. And not far away, he said, he hopes to install a hydrogen system, another source of renewable fuel.

It’s all part of Mr. Freeman’s unlikely dream here in the Mojave Desert — to turn this tiny town into a community running on clean power entirely of its own making.

The dream began in earnest about 30 years ago, when Mr. Freeman, a gold miner living in Malibu, bought this ghost town — hotel and general store included. He still has a ways to go, but Nipton now produces roughly half the electricity for its fluctuating population of 30 to 70 residents from the array Mr. Freeman installed in 2010.

“The more independent we can become of outside resources, the better,” Mr. Freeman said, citing the rising cost of utility power, frequent outages and preserving the environment as motivation. “I’ve been conscious of the global warming issue since my early days in school. It’s only now beginning to be so much part of the present day. People are slow to adapt to an oncoming reality.”

For decades, people have experimented with self-reliant living, whether hippies flocking to communes in the hills or survivalists hunkering down across the plains. But not since Henry David Thoreau took off into the woods near Walden Pond has the idea of going off the grid seemed so within reach — albeit this time without sacrificing the modern conveniences.

With cheaper and more widely available ways to make power at home or in town, individuals and communities have been moving ever closer to declaring their energy independence, using technologies like solar, batteries and even small-scale wind. In recent years, towns dedicated to environmental sustainability while reducing the reliance on fossil fuels — known as transition towns — have sprung up in Europe, Australia and the Americas.

Still, it is not yet easy to unplug from the power system, as Mr. Freeman’s journey — which he may not get to complete because of flagging health — illustrates.

Mr. Freeman, 81, first got to know the place — not much more than a few buildings plopped behind the railroad tracks like a movie set — back in the 1950s. With a degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology, he would come from Los Angeles to prospect for gold, spending days climbing and sampling the rocks on his own. He eventually established a successful mine and moved to Malibu with his second wife, Roxanne Lang, now 63, whom he had met on a dive boat off Catalina and wooed with the opening line, “Can I help you with your wet-suit?” she recalled.

But Malibu became expensive and was far from the mining operations he oversaw. So when Nipton came up for sale, he bought it, moving there with Ms. Lang in 1984.

The town offered tremendous natural resources in the form of a Pleistocene-era underground lake whose waters flow there first and strong, year-round sunshine barely trespassed by clouds. It also had a rich history, bustling from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries along with the mining industry, and even boasting a hotel that played host to the silent-movie star Clara Bow, who owned a ranch nearby.

But by the time the couple moved there, it was all but empty and in disrepair. They stayed for six years, until their son outgrew the one-room schoolhouse that serves the area, and then moved to Henderson, Nev., a Las Vegas suburb.

In that time, they reopened the store and cafe and restored the hotel room by room, creating a destination for bikers, hikers, miners and tourists, especially Europeans, looking for the flavor of the Old West.

Michael Truman, for instance, usually escapes the cold of Medicine Hat, in Alberta, Canada, to come to the area from November to March. He had never been to Nipton before, but took a different road looking for places to travel with the dog he was planning to look after for friends and stumbled upon it.

“It looked cool, so I said, ‘I’m going there,’ ” he said, adding that he would probably bring the dog back for a day in the preserve bordering the town. “I like plants and animals more than people — they’re easier to get along with.”

It has also attracted a cluster of about 10 full-time residents who work in Nipton, some who say they were attracted by its peace and solitude.

The couple running the cafe, Susan and Fernando Gamez, have begun growing some of the vegetables they use for offerings like the If Looks Could Kale burger, using an intensive vertical system intended to save on space, energy and water.

“The whole area is more and more into how do we use our environment,” said a woman behind the cash register who gave her name as Brenda M. “Let’s not trash it; what can we do with it?”

For Mr. Freeman, those questions were there all along. He had begun experimenting even before he bought the town, using a grant from the state to plant eucalyptus as a potential energy source and farming euphorbia, which produces a latex that can be refined into fuel.

But he had always been interested in solar, he said. Over the years, he talked to several companies about installing an array, but it was too expensive. Then he came across a Palo Alto-based company that used mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on light-sensitive material to increase the efficiency and lower the cost, and decided to go ahead, especially given the generous state and federal incentives.

That company, Skyline, has since gone out of business, but the array shines on.

“It seems to come up when the normal path of the 20th century toward eternal growth is stymied or when groups of people feel like that path is not going to work for them,” said Dona Brown, a University of Vermont professor and author of “Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America.”

Mr. Freeman said he was now looking to a system to make hydrogen, both to store energy and to sell. The couple have put in five tent cabins using a modified Frank Lloyd Wright design and are talking about building an R.V. park to accommodate workers from the giant Ivanpah solar power plant nearby and a rare-earth mine just around the bend.

Mr. Freeman may not be the one to see all those plans to fruition, however. With diagnoses of congestive heart and renal failures, he is considering selling the town or finding a partner who can realize the vision.

Standing near the spot where, on those long-ago prospecting trips, he would call the train depot to tell the motorman to pick him up on the way back, he referred to the need for self-sufficiency in the face of global warming and economic instability.

“Things are evolving and the future is clear,” he said. “It’s just a question of how soon we can get there.”

Quirky desert town takes pride in what it has to offer

NIPTON - They came here for the gold.

By MARK MUCKENFUSS
The Press-Enterprise

Not that they found much, at least not enough to get rich.

But that didn't keep them from staying in this speck of a town in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Nipton is California's last outpost off of Interstate 15, just 2 ½ miles from the Nevada state line.

Heading south on Nipton Road from the interstate, the town is a small puff of green in the road on the far side of the valley that bleeds into Ivanpah Dry Lake.

Its 30-some residents live in a brutal yet scenic landscape, where the wind whips west from the Mojave National Preserve's barren New York Mountains and trains thunder by on their way to and from Los Angeles.

Coming into town, visitors cross the rails to find a dirt parking lot on one side of the road where the Nipton Trading Post is flanked by a café and the Hotel Nipton. A dusty RV park sits on the other side of the road.

Nipton was once touched by celebrity -- silent-film star Clara Bow occasionally stayed in its tiny hotel. Now it is a curiosity for tourists, a road stop for bikers and a place for people with little love for the city to hide away.

Jerry Freeman, who bought the town in 1984, is working to make it an inviting place for artists. He has begun an artist-in-residence program with the help of the national preserve and hopes to expand it.

While any large mining operations around Nipton have pretty much dried up, Freeman still finds the gold connection interesting.

The first man to settle here, at the turn of the 20th century, was Samuel Duncan Karns, a man who made millions in Pennsylvania oil and then lost it by investing in railroads. He came west to look for gold and established the Nippeno Consolidated Mine, reportedly borrowing a Pennsylvania area Native American name.

Karns died in 1909, four years after the railroad came through and dubbed the spot Nipton.

In 1913, another prospector showed up. Harry Trehearne was a miner from Cornwall, England. He never had much luck finding precious ore, but he opened a store in Nipton, selling supplies to other miners.

That building, not much more than a shack, still stands on the property, behind the Hotel Nipton and across from a dirt road that Freeman says was once a stage route linking Searchlight, Nev., -- 20 miles east -- with the rail line.

A trained geologist, Freeman first came to Nipton in the late 1950s when he was a college student. For a time after he graduated, he would show up most weekends, looking for gold.

"I'd take the train and arrive here in the early a.m.," he says. "I had a Jeep parked here and I would spend the weekend prospecting. At that time, the hotel was in service."

But things were on the decline. Trehearne, who took over construction of the hotel from the railroad and later added the trading post, had died in 1949. Subsequent owners let things fall apart.

By the early 1980s, when Freeman noticed a sales ad for the property and drove out to look at it, Nipton was more desolate than he remembered.

"The hotel was a wreck," he says. In fact, the county had condemned it.

"We bought a ghost town and decided to transform it," he says, "to take this clay and reshape it into something I consider more useful and interesting and enduring."

He stops talking as one of the many daily trains rumbles down the track.

"Out here the protocol is don't try to talk when a train goes by," he says. "Nothing you have to say can't wait until after the train goes by."

After investing lots of time and money in the hotel, Freeman and his wife reopened it in 1986 as a bed and breakfast. It has only five rooms. Four eco-cabins have been added out back.

A cactus garden with a geometric design fronts the small hotel, which was built sometime between 1905 and 1910. On its front porch are old round-back wooden rockers. Inside, historic photos dot the walls. An old wood stove is the centerpiece of the long narrow lobby.

Freeman points out Room No. 3.

"Clara Bow, she was the most famous celebrity to visit here and this was her favorite room," he says.

She and her husband lived on the Walking Box Ranch near Searchlight. "Her husband drove their cattle here to load them on the train and they would stay here."

When the hotel first reopened, Freeman says, business was understandably slow. But with the establishment of the Mojave National Preserve in 1994, things picked up. The hotel is usually booked for most of the spring.

Warm Welcome

People began moving in and making Nipton their home, as well.

Initially miners populated the RV park when the area enjoyed a brief boom in the late 1980s. Most moved out, but others came. Those who live here say it has a charm that may not be immediately evident.

Cindy Adams, 57, remembers her first visit. She and her husband moved here six months ago from Colorado when he took a job at the mining operation in nearby Mountain Pass.

They pulled up one evening, hauling a trailer with their belongings.
"I leaned down and looked out the window and then at my husband and I said, 'Is this it?' " she says.

The friendly greeting they received improved her outlook.

"I went into the store and they were like, 'Oh yeah, we knew you were coming,' " she says.
She's now adjusted to the isolation of the desert, even though sometimes it's a little too slow for her. She works in the Trading Post two days a week and helps out at the café.

"Every two weeks we have big excitement," she says, laughing. "The bookmobile shows up on Wednesday and everybody comes down and gets coffee at the store and their books. And on Friday, the Schwan's man comes.

"But there're days when it's very quiet and we're all, 'Hmmm ... ' "

Rosie Davidson and her husband Donald are Washington, D.C., residents who are in their third extended stay in Nipton. Donald is part of the Artists in the Parks program and is working for the Mojave National Preserve as Nipton's current artist- in-residence.

"I fell in love with it the first time I saw it," Rosie says of the town. "I think this place is idyllic in many ways."

Donald says he finds beauty in the stark desert surroundings. He spends most days in the field, cataloging and doing pen and ink drawings and watercolors of native flowers. He may drive as much as two hours into the desert to find the particular species he's looking for.

"There's so much to preserve here," he says. "It's one of the most unsullied desert environments that the public has access to. The programs that I am part of and that I promote are more needed out here."

In addition to providing artwork and information to the park service, Davidson conducts educational workshops, teaching adults and children how to recognize and draw native plants.

"Visitors no longer just want to walk through a park," he says. "They want to engage in an experience such as a hands-on workshop where their work can make a contribution."

Some of Davidson's work hangs in the Trading Post, which is filled with curious items such as old lanterns hanging from the ceiling, American Indian dolls, papier-mache camels from India and plush scorpions and tortoises. If you want to buy a Nipton postcard you have one choice, showing the hotel, of course.

Desert Dwellers

Next door, the Whistlestop Oasis boasts a rooftop sign that says, "Best Burgers Around."

Being as there isn't much else around for 20 miles that might not mean much. But Bill Sarbello, 60, who runs the place, says customers drive from as far as Henderson -- 50 miles -- to eat in the casual hominess of the diner. Then they leave, which is just how he likes it.

"Come in and have a couple of beers, something to eat, play a game of pool and go away," Sarbello says.

The ex-New Yorker by way of Florida came to Nipton three years ago to take over the café.

"I'm making something grow out here in the desert," he says.

He'd been to the area before and knew what to expect when he arrived, not only from the town but the residents. He'd seen the same thing when he lived on St. John, one of the Virgin Islands.

"St. John is a desert," he says, with the only source of water being rainfall. "Everything that grows there has a thorn or a barb, and so do the people. Nipton's the same way. If you're going to come here and live, you're probably going to have some kind of thorn."

Larry Jordan, who has been running the Trading Post for six months, has seen it, too.

"Desert dwellers, they're kind of not in the mainstream," he says. "Maybe they're here because they couldn't make it anywhere else in society and they kind of keep to themselves."

Jordan and his wife are temporary residents. They are part of a program that provides store managers and workers to national parks and private campgrounds. They plan to be gone when the full heat of summer hits.

Until then, he says, he tells friends, "We're conveniently located in the middle of nowhere."