After a quick lunch, we headed further south to check out the town of Bombay Beach. Bombay Beach is an interesting little place. With a population of about 300 people, it is often used as a symbol of the failed American dream, as most of the town's residents came here with dreams of living in a resort mecca and ended up living in a desert $h!t hole. The west end of the town has suffered the same flooding fate as North Shore, and the ruins have served as the backdrop or inspiration for countless movies, documentaries, music videos, and video games. It used to be a very secluded and desolate place with friendly locals who loved to share tales of the past and present. Now, it's a popular destination for hipster artists who love to make exhibits out of the flooded buildings and leftover destruction. I was a bit disappointed with how "disturbed" the area is from what I had expected based on my research. The majority of the ruins have been separated by a large levee that was constructed to protect the rest of the town. There were about 15 or 20 vehicles parked in a dirt lot just east of the levee, and easily 40 people walking around and checking out the "ruins" (which were basically just art sculptures made from whatever debris remained and even a lot of stuff that had obviously been hauled into the area). We didn't stay long, and I didn't bother snapping many photos. I did take one cool shot of an old sea wall or pier structure that still looked pretty original. I also shot a cool photo of the old Southern Pacific railroad bridge that crosses Salt Creek next to Highway 111, just south of Bombay Beach.
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From there, we headed further south and then east into the desert to see if we could find any remains of the old Eagle Mountain Railroad. For those that don't know, I'm a huge fan of railroads. The Eagle Mountain Railroad was one of the last privately constructed and operated railroads in the post-WWII era. It was constructed by Kaiser Steel to serve as their logistics link between their Eagle Mountain Iron Mine east of the Coachella Valley (north of what is now the community of Desert Center off of I-10) and their refinery operations in Fontana, CA. Believe it or not, the steel operations that ran this railroad actually served as the birth of the Kaiser Permanente healthcare system. Henry Kaiser employed hundreds of workers at the mine who lived in a makeshift mining camp in the middle of the desert. A doctor moved to the area and set up an office in Desert Center, thinking he'd make a killing by treating the workers who lived out there and had no where else to go (another cool fact - his office was the first facility between Arizona and Los Angeles to offer an air conditioned facility to escape the heat). Well it turns out that many of the miners would come to him when they were sick or injured and ask for treatment with a promise to pay the doctor when they received their paychecks from Kaiser. Unfortunately, the miners almost always accidentally drank away their entire paychecks at one of the bars on their way to pay the doctor and he went unpaid for most of his care. He eventually decided to close up shop and move back to the big city, and when Kaiser caught word of this, he knew it would be devastating to his workforce. He met with the doctor and asked what could be done, and ultimately decided that he would keep 5 cents from each workers' paychecks to pay the doctor in advance for his care and treatment. Essentially, he paid him to be the town's healthcare professional, and to care for anyone who needed it whenever they needed it. This also prompted his workforce to visit the doctor more often, and ensured his team stayed as healthy as possible. As the town of Eagle Mountain developed into a full-scale company town with over 4,000 residents, the Kaiser healthcare system expanded and Henry Kaiser expanded the model to include many of his other mining and business interests around the country and the world. Eventually, Kaiser Permanente was formed as a spinoff, and survives to this day despite Kaiser Steel having gone belly up many years ago.
Anyway, as some of you saw in a post I made several months back, the Eagle Mountain Railroad is in the process of being removed by a company that has taken over ownership of the Eagle Mountain mining site. The company is trying to build a electric generating station that would pump water between the two massive open pit mines, which would allow them to essentially "store" wind and solar electricity and re-generate it at night and during peak times. Part of the requirement of the acquisition was that the company either restore the railroad to working condition, or pay to have it removed. They unfortunately chose the latter, and this amazing piece of history has been slowly disappearing from east to west over the past year.
We were pleased to find that much of the western end of the railroad line remains intact. We found a cool bridge that crosses over the Coachella Canal, and it is even still painted with the Kaiser Steel logo. We didn't make it far enough east to see if the huge trestle bridge over Salt Creek still remains, but I'm planning to head back to the area soon and will check it out. Once we finished exploring the railroad, the weather was getting worse and the sunlight was quickly diminishing, so we decided to call it a day and head back to the Palm Springs area where we stayed for the night.
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