I’m relieved when a heavily tattooed man with a kind smile greets me from across the square. Walking the long colonnade, ruminating on the bones below, I realize I haven't seen another living soul yet beyond the coyote. In its mining heyday, when hundreds of men lived in brutal conditions in a tent city where I’m standing, bodies were buried fast before the searing heat could rot the corpses. I knock on various doors, the blue paint flakes off on my knuckles, and I worry that just my being here is destroying something special. I wander the grounds, trying to find the entrance to no avail. Pulling up next to the Spanish Colonial square, I park where I think the parking lot should be, though there are no other cars. The place is in disrepair, save for a lone icon of American eccentricity, the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, that is open for business today, if you can find the lobby. Derelict cottages and sand-beaten mills bake in the sun, looking like they could blow away in a strong wind.

The old elevated Death Valley Railroad that once carried borax out of the valley to Los Angeles now splinters into the sand. The settlement is like nowhere else in California. The remains of the Death Valley Railroad, Death Valley Junction, Calif.

One of those towns is Death Valley Junction.

Its ancient salty lake bed, when plundered for its valuable minerals a century ago, gave rise to fringe communities on the edge of the desert and on the edge of life. As I pull into the town, imagining I’m in a dusty 1990s David Lynch movie, I swerve to avoid a coyote hobbling across the road, which seemed far too on-the-nose.ĭeath Valley is both the lowest land in America and the hottest place on Earth. I drove into Death Valley Junction on a fall afternoon where the extreme summer temperatures that can reach 130 degrees there had dropped to a chilly mid-80s.

Amargosa opera house.