Actors Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart talk about shooting their duet scene at "The Slabs" for the 2007 movie Into the Wild. The movie, based on a John Krakaur book, is about Christopher McCandless, an smart student and athlete, who wandered away from society seeking his own answers, and eventually died in Alaska. This scene was actually shot at Slab City.
I was talking to a friend who's into off road racing trucks, about this blog. I said something like, "You go out to Ocotillo, right? Have you ever been out to the big metal sculptures at Borrego Springs?" He said he had, and I told him I wrote a blog post about those. We got talking about the Southern California desert, and I told him about the legends of the ship in desert. He hadn't heard that legend, but it sounded interesting. Then he said, "and there's that lawless place out there, too, by the Salton Sea." I wasn't sure what he was talking about. Then it clicked, "Slab City?" He said that was the place. That seems to be the way people think of Slab City, those who have heard of it, or maybe visited it, it's "that lawless place."
Slab City got its name because there are a whole bunch of concrete slabs out there, making nive flat places to park a camper, or built your own house of some sort in a place no one really cares about. At least most of the time. The slabs are the remnants of a retired Marine Corps camp's gunnery range.
I first heard about Slab City in the movie Into the Wild. I later read the book, and it stuck in my mind. I was working as a taxi driver in Orange County in 2007, and once or twice a week I'd go see a movie in the early afternoon, as much to escape the heat as to watch any particular movie. Into the Wild was one of the most fascinating movies I saw back then.
I was living in my taxi, working 7 days a week, 16-18 hours most days, just struggling to pay my $550 a week taxi lease. The idea of wandering off into the wild sounded pretty good at the time. The taxi business was going downhill, due to the computer dispatching system, which allowed taxi companies to put far too many cabs on the road for the amount of business that existed.
On Thanksgiving weekend, 2007, I finally hit the point where I wasn't going to make my lease by the next Monday. Totally burnt out, grossly overweight, and not sure what to do with my life, I decided to take a drive that Sunday morning. My goal was to find Slab City, just to check the place out. I didn't work that Saturday night, I felt kind of sick. So I woke up about 4:00 am. I headed south on the 5 freeway, and then east on route 78. Around dawn, I pulled off in a little area in the Anzo Borrego State Park, and took a short hike on a trail there. I got back in my cab, and headed east, until I hit route 86, on the west side of the Salton Sea, California's largest lake, and one of the craziest stories in the state. But that's a tale for another day.
I had a computer in the pawn shop, that I bought just to edit video with, but I never got on the internet then, so I had no idea exactly where Slab City was, I just knew it was somehwere near the Salton Sea, which is like 30 miles long. I drove north, got some breakfast near a casino, and asked a couple people where Slab City was. I went out to the edge of the once popular, now dying Salton Sea, where the bones of millions of dead fish scatter the shore. I headed south, taking tips from a local, but never found Slab City. It was getting hot out, so I headed back up to Orange County.
The next morning I dropped off my taxi at the company, simply dropped the keys at the window, and walked away with my small backpack and about $15. My health was so bad, after three bouts of cellulitis in my legs that year, that I didn't expect to live more than a few weeks on the street. I wound up living on the streets of Orange County for nearly a year.
I've still never been to Slab City. I saw a cool TV show where some skaters went out there and built a mini skatepark, and skated for a few days. There are several videos on YouTube about the place, I'll link some below.
The basic story is that the place was built as Camp Dunlap, a Marine Corps training base in 1942, during World War II. It was functional and used for three years, then dropped down to a skeleton crew. According to Wikipedia, the big area of concrete slabs was part of the artillery range. When it was abandoned, a few drifters set up camp there. A few more came along, and it became a squatters community of people moving in and out, including many snowbirds from northern areas, coming in the winter. The Department of Defense gave the land to the state of California in 1961 officially.
Slab City is pretty close to the middle of fucking nowhere, which is a great place to go if you want to "get away from it all." It's east of the southern end of the Salton Sea, off route 111, near Niland. It's in Imperial county, part of the Sonoran desert, and temperatures can reach a toasty 122 degrees F in the summer.
It's generally seen as a place where the government didn't care about, so people could live cheap with basically no laws. Anarchy in the desert. Since I've found it interesting, but never been there, I'll let the people from Slab City tell their stories, in the links below. I also recommend the movie Into the Wild, and The Salton Sea (which is about meth,so MAJOR trigger alert if you're a recovering tweeker).
Last Free Place in America (52 minutes)
Inside Slab City (from Vice- 22 minutes)
Lawless Slab City (The Roi's VLOG 21 minutes)
The Real Local resident of Slab City (2021- 37 minutes)
Exploring East Jesus- Slab City (12 minutes)
Salvation Mountain (9 minutes)
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