Salt built this California ghost town. Now salt is destroying it.

Saltdale is not California’s most picturesque ghost town. It’s certainly not the largest, nor is it the most historical. But it may be the next to disappear.

Saltdale sinks into Koehn Lake, a dry lakebed with salt deposits on its surface in the Mojave Desert, about 20 miles north of California City.

Up close, the old mining community doesn’t look like much. It’s hard to tell where the town ends and the salt mine begins. And due to the gradual decay, it’s also hard to tell where the mine ends and the lake begins.

During its heyday in the 1910s, Saltdale produced tens of thousands of tons of salt a year. For decades after, the mine supported a community with a post office, school and company store. All that’s left today are remnants of an expired town slowly fading away.

Salt, once responsible for Saltdale’s creation, is now the agent of its decay.

Surrounding Saltdale are raised ridges of hardened mud that divide the lake into little man-made pools of mushy salt. On top of these ridges rest the remains of a once-extensive salt-mining operation. 

“Lake” is a misnomer. Koehn Lake is a dry lake — or, to be precise, a moist one. The empty lakebed sits atop an undrained basin. Water from the basin reaches ground level through a process known as capillary action, which also helps pull water up tree trunks. There, it moistens the sand on the surface, turning it into a mush with the consistency of quicksand. 

Crucially, the water carries with it salt, which it deposits on the lake’s surface, crystallizing into a white, frosty layer. It looks like a dusting of snow in the desert.

During a visit on an October morning in 2023, I saw metal half-pipes with their tops rusting away. Wooden train tracks had frayed into limp, wispy splinters. Fences built to box in the pools now tilt into the muck. In some of the pools, thin films of salt climbed over recently discarded beer cans — the first step in a long process of salt decay. 

It was quiet, save for the desert wind and occasional, muffled sonic booms from Edwards Air Force Base’s jets. When I stepped into one of the pools of salt, it felt solid at first, but the mineral layer cracked, giving way to quicksand. 

A small building with corrugated metal walls sat in the middle of one of the salt pools. Rust climbed from its base; its outer wall warped outward. The structure slanted as if it was about to sink.

This, as far as I could tell, was the only remaining building in Saltdale. 

Opportunists saw the lake’s potential and snatched up mining claims. Although salt lacked gold’s value (or romance), its use in chemical and industrial processes made it a valuable mineral. And Koehn Lake’s salt supply was seemingly endless. 

Year after year, fresh salt climbed to the surface, replenishing the stores. Other factors — like the lake’s location near a railway and power infrastructure not far from Los Angeles — made it even more desirable.

“Every year you could mine it and there would be more salt,” Larry Vredenburgh, a co-author of the Desert Symposium article who worked as a Bureau of Land Management geologist for 40 years, told SFGATE. 

The history of the mining operation’s early days is hard to parse, Vredenburgh admits. Scores of miners held placer claims to the lake, many of which were leased to other, bigger mining operations, and claim jumping was common. Eventually, conflicts over mining claims reached their climax in a gunfight in 1912 between two dueling claimholders.

By 1914, the Consolidated Salt Company took over most of the salt mining operations and built a four-story mill. It employed somewhere between 30 and 65 people at the time — enough to sustain a small town. 

Saltdale was born. The community was small enough that it never incorporated, remaining a company town for the duration of its brief existence. Employees and their families lived in wooden houses and shopped at the company store. They went to church in the nearby towns of Randsburg and Cantil. 

These were the good times for Saltdale. Even in the thick of the Great Depression throughout the 1930s, the plant produced between 3,800 and 8,100 tons of salt per year for a decade, satisfying its new parent company, Western Salt.

The histories of western mining towns are tales of boom and bust, and Saltdale is no exception. The good times soured in the late 1940s, when a few nearly rainless years shuttered the mining operation. With less water seeping into the lake, there was less groundwater to carry salt deposits to the lakebed. 

“Somehow in the process of the dwindling rainfall, it didn’t deposit as much salt as it normally would have,” Vredenburgh said.

The town quickly collapsed. By 1949, only three employees remained at the mill. The post office closed in 1950; the school district dissolved the next year. 

Although the salt mill continued to churn through imported salt, the town was no more. In the 1970s, the mill finally shuttered. No trace of the structure remains today.

Now the most striking sight at Saltdale is not its tattered industrial debris, but the lake that passively feeds on them: a milky, crystalline expanse, faintly gleaming under the desert sun. 

Salt creeps upward. It damages wood and rusts metal — the two materials from which most of Saltdale was constructed. Some structures, like the corrugated metal building, sink into the salty muck. The salt climbs out of the lake and eats away at the remaining railroad tracks.

Saltdale occupies a curious fate among ghost towns. Most mining towns remain after they’re vacated, dotting hostile landscapes with their rusty husks. But Saltdale is decaying at the hands of the mineral it mined. The town once ate from the earth. Now the earth eats it in return.