12 Most Isolated Californian Towns — Why People Still Choose to Stay

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]There are towns in California where the post office knows your name, the nearest hospital is 2 hours away, and the gas station closed during the Reagan administration.

[00:00:10]We're talking about the 12 most isolated towns in the entire state. Places so cut off from civilization that a few of them aren't even technically alive anymore.

[00:00:21]Yet, people refuse to leave.

[00:00:24]So today we're finding out exactly who is still living in these forgotten corners of California and the wild, weird, sometimes tragic reasons they call it home. We've got a town with a population of zero where the post office is somehow still open. A ballerina who painted a fake audience on the wall so she would never dance to an empty room, then performed for them for 45 years.

[00:00:51]A high school with the only dirt football field in America because the soil is too salty for grass.

[00:00:58]And one community that burned down twice in 8 months looked at the ashes and said, "You know what? Let's rebuild right here." Hit that subscribe button now because if you don't, I will personally drive to your house, knock on your door, and ask you why. And no, I will not accept I forgot as an answer.

[00:01:18]Let's get into it. Tucked high in the eastern Sierra Nevada, Markleyville is the county seat of Alpine County, the least populated county in the entire state of California. Just 191 people live in the town itself. The whole county only has around 1,200 residents, and there are more campgrounds in Alpine County than there are actual towns.

[00:01:41]The drive-in is a slow ribbon of mountain road past Grover Hot Springs and through the Carson River Canyon. The closest real city is Carson City, Nevada, about 30 mi east. And South Lake Tahoe is just over the mountains to the north. But close is relative when you live at 5,500 ft elevation, and the snow can shut roads down for weeks at a time.

[00:02:05]For a while, things actually seemed fine here.

[00:02:08]Markleyville started as a mining camp in 1861, named after Jacob Markley, who in classic frontier fashion, was shot dead a few years later.

[00:02:19]The Cutthroat Tavern, which has been pouring drinks since 1862, claims to be the oldest bar in the county. That did not last forever, though, because by the time the mining boom collapsed, Markleyville had to figure out what came next.

[00:02:34]What came next was the death ride.

[00:02:37]Every July, hundreds of cyclists show up to suffer through 103 miles of mountain road and roughly 14,000 ft of vertical climb across five Sierra passes.

[00:02:48]It is one of the most punishing single-day bike races in the country.

[00:02:53]And it is basically the town's annual economic resurrection.

[00:02:57]The people who stay here stay for two reasons. First, multigenerational ranching families with land that has been in the family since their great great grandparents wrestled it out of the wilderness. Second, refugees from California's coastal madness who wanted hot springs, pine trees, and a population so small that everyone notices when your truck does not start in the morning. If you can survive the winters, Markleyville is paradise. If you cannot, you will be packed up and gone by your second blizzard.

[00:03:28]Way up in Trinity County, where the Clamoth Mountains meet the Trinity Alps, there is a community called Coffee Creek. Roughly 150 people live here, scattered along a single road that disappears into the wilderness.

[00:03:41]To get there, you drive past Weaverville, the county seat. You keep going past Trinity Lake. You keep going past every cell tower the modern world has bothered to install.

[00:03:52]And eventually, you reach Coffee Creek Road, which winds 20 m up into the Trinity Alps.

[00:03:58]Most of those miles are dirt. You need a high clearance vehicle. In winter, you need chains. In a really bad winter, you need a helicopter.

[00:04:08]Coffee Creek is the northernmost real community in Trinity County. The nearest grocery store of any real size is over an hour away in Weaverville. The nearest hospital is in Reading, which is closer to 2 hours when the weather behaves, and significantly longer when it does not.

[00:04:25]Up to this point, you might be thinking, "Okay, it's just remote. That isn't unusual." But here's the part where things stopped being funny.

[00:04:34]Wildfires devastate this region almost every other year. The car fire in 2018, the August complex in 2020, and a string of smaller fires have kept the threat constant. Coffee Creek residents have evacuated their homes more times than most Americans have ever moved. So why stay? Because the Trinity Alps are arguably the most beautiful wilderness area in California that nobody outside California has ever heard of. Because the people who live here run wilderness packed trips, summer camps, and small ranches that have been passed down through families for over a century. And because once you've watched a sunrise over the Sawtooth Ridge from your front porch, the idea of moving back to a city with a Trader Joe's feels like a downgrade. A small price to pay apparently for living in a place that looks like a screen saver.

[00:05:23]Number 10, Likely. This is where the map stopped trying. Likely sits along Highway 395 in the South Fork Valley of Modoc County, 18 mi south of Alurus, which is itself 200 m from anywhere you've heard of.

[00:05:40]Population 53.

[00:05:43]I want you to pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything.

[00:05:48]The town's name comes from the 1870s when residents could not agree on what to call their new post office. A local rancher said they would most likely never agree.

[00:05:58]Someone wrote down the name likely as a joke.

[00:06:02]It stuck. That's the energy of this entire town. The closest gas station, if you are heading south, is in Standish, which is 70 mi away. The closest restaurant is in Susenville, which is even further. The likely elementary school closed in 2012 when enrollment dropped below 12 students.

[00:06:21]Jimmy Richardson, who graduated from that school in 1947, told a reporter that it was a definite loss and that everybody still talks about the loss of the school. He has watched the town shrink from several hundred residents down to under 60.

[00:06:37]Jennifer Florenoi runs the Likely General Store, which sells groceries, fencing supplies, auto parts, and lends out books from a small library shelf.

[00:06:46]When asked about her town's motto, she laughed and said that their town motto is where the hell is likely, which is frankly the perfect motto for a place where the internet was still dial up as of recent reporting.

[00:06:59]So, why does anyone live here? Because the Macarva family has been ranching this valley for generations. Because Mrs. Macarva personally helped drag the historic Likely Church on a trailer to a better lot in town just to keep the building from collapsing.

[00:07:14]Because when locals talk about Likely, they talk about it like a person they love. Stubborn, weird, dying, but still standing. The clock is ticking on Likely, and residents know it. But none of them are going anywhere. Number nine, Doyle.

[00:07:31]Doyle is a tiny isolated community on Highway 395 in Lassen County, about 45 miles northwest of Reno. Around 6 or 700 people live here in roughly 450 homes.

[00:07:43]And in less than a year, this town went from quiet desert outpost to national news story twice.

[00:07:50]In November of 2020, a wind-driven wildfire tore through Doyle and destroyed 21 homes. It was devastating, but the town survived.

[00:08:00]Eight months later, in July of 2021, the Beckworth Complex Fire, the largest California wildfire of that year at over 100,000 acres, swept through Doyle on July 10th and destroyed 33 more homes.

[00:08:14]That is roughly 50 homes lost in less than a year in a town with only 450 homes.

[00:08:21]Beverly Hoody Shell, a descendant of the man Doyle is named after, told reporters that she had to grab her oxygen and still did not take all of it because she just wanted to get out of here. Her family has lived in Doyle for generations. Michael Snook lost everything.

[00:08:37]He stood in the ashes of his house and pointed at the wreckage.

[00:08:41]He said it burned so hot there was not much left.

[00:08:45]He pointed to what had been a desk and to a refrigerator that did not really look like anything.

[00:08:51]He still had his pigs, biscuit, and gravy.

[00:08:55]Kathy Catherine, the chief of Doyle's volunteer fire protection district, which has only 16 volunteers, including her own family, told a reporter that for this community, it is devastating.

[00:09:08]Fire insurance is very expensive, and there are a lot of people who cannot afford it.

[00:09:14]Jake Kaggel, a federal fire operations chief, described the Beckworth complex's behavior as unusual fire runs, things that they were not trained to witness.

[00:09:25]And yet, when the smoke cleared, the residents of Doyle did the thing that statistically should not happen.

[00:09:32]They rebuilt.

[00:09:35]A woman named Quavvis walked back to the historic Constantia Church, which somehow survived the fire and rang its bell 50 times so the whole town would know they were back.

[00:09:45]That's Doyle, burned, broken, and still standing on principal alone.

[00:09:52]Happy Camp sits in the Clamoth River Canyon along Highway 96, 70 mi west of Interstate 5. Roughly 900 people live here, which sounds like a lot until you realize the population dropped 24% in just a decade.

[00:10:07]The closest hospital is in Eureka, 70 mi east on a winding mountain road that can take 2 hours when conditions are good and significantly longer when they are not.

[00:10:18]This is the headquarters of the Carrick tribe, the second largest federally recognized tribe in California with around 3,500 enrolled members.

[00:10:28]The Carak language has fewer than five fluent speakers, according to recent estimates, and the tribe's economic development efforts have become a lifeline for the entire town since the logging industry collapsed in the 1990s under spotted owl litigation.

[00:10:42]But here's the detail that everyone misses about Happy Camp.

[00:10:46]The town has an 18t tall Bigfoot statue at the corner of Davis Road and Highway 96 made entirely of recycled metal by a local artist named Cheryl Wayright.

[00:10:58]The town hosts an annual Bigfoot jamboree. There is a Bigfoot scenic byway sign on the way in. A local artist named Dennis Day built what residents claim is the world's largest dream catcher. Happy Camp is against all odds leaning into being weird.

[00:11:17]Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The town has had real problems. Meth trafficking, poverty hovering around 24%, persistent struggles with rural healthcare access. But the wildfires are the existential threat. the 2014 Happy Camp Complex, the 2020 Slater Fire, and especially the 2023 Happy Camp Complex, which burned for 68 days across nearly a dozen separate fires in the Clamoth National Forest, have devastated the region.

[00:11:48]So, why do people stay? Because the Carrick people consider this land sacred and have lived along this river for thousands of years.

[00:11:58]Because the Clamoth River, after the recent dam removal project that made national news, is finally starting to recover its salmon runs. Because if you grew up in this canyon, no city on Earth feels like home the way this one does.

[00:12:12]Bigfoot might not exist, but the people of Happy Camp absolutely do. And they're not going anywhere. This one is so remote that I had to double check it actually exists.

[00:12:24]Forks of Salmon sits at the confluence of the north and south forks of the Salmon River deep inside the Clamoth National Forest in Sysu County. Over 98% of the surrounding land is national forest.

[00:12:37]The total population of the entire watershed including the nearby communities of Sawyers Bar and Ceelville is around 250 people.

[00:12:46]To get here, you drive the Salmon River Road, a route motorcyclists have nicknamed the Bolivian death road.

[00:12:54]30 m of single lane mountain road with no guardrails and sheer drops to the river below. There is no cellular service. There is no utility provided electricity except for the three lowermost miles.

[00:13:08]The only formal water utility in the entire watershed is in the slightly larger village of Sawyers Bar. And yes, kids still live here.

[00:13:18]Forks of salmon.

[00:13:20]Elementary serves kindergarten through 8th grade, typically with anywhere from 6 to 15 students total.

[00:13:27]But the same isolation that makes Forks of Salmon a kayaker's paradise has a much darker side.

[00:13:34]In February of 1995, a man named Jerry Davidson was shot and killed in Forks of Salmon by another resident, J. D.

[00:13:42]Grryer.

[00:13:44]Grryer was charged with first-degree murder, but ultimately acquitted on the grounds of self-defense.

[00:13:49]In a town this small, that case is still talked about three decades later.

[00:13:54]Just down the road from Forks of Salmon, hidden in the forest between the two river forks, is Black Bear Ranch. It's the longest continuously running commune in the United States. Founded in 1968 by Back to the Land Hippies, it's still running. Many of the original residents and their grandchildren still live in the watershed.

[00:14:14]So, who lives here in 2026?

[00:14:19]Wilderness guides, kaying instructors at the legendary Otterbar Lodge, soap makers, small-scale cannabis farmers operating under Trinity and Sysu County permits.

[00:14:33]A future Olympic runner once grew up here, a man named Gabe Jennings, who competed in the 2000 Sydney Games.

[00:14:41]People who are willing to trade indoor plumbing reliability for the ability to look up at a sky so dark, you can see the Milky Way like it's a street light.

[00:14:49]Forks of Salmon is not a town. It's a lifestyle commitment. And the people who chose it are not the kind of people who change their minds easily.

[00:14:59]Cedarville sits in Surprise Valley in the absolute far northeast corner of California against the Nevada border.

[00:15:07]To get there from Alurus, the only real town in Modoc County, you drive 60 mi east over Cedar Pass at 6,300 ft elevation.

[00:15:17]The population is 437, down from over 500 just a decade ago.

[00:15:22]The median age is 56.

[00:15:26]Surprise Valley feels frozen in time.

[00:15:28]Ranching families have been here for four or more generations.

[00:15:32]The land is gorgeous. All sagebrush plains and snowcapped mountains. And the politics are deeply, defiantly conservative.

[00:15:42]Modok County once tried to secede from California along with Syskiu County to form the state of Jefferson.

[00:15:49]But then a person made the one decision that changed everything. On February 20th, 2014, a woman named Sheree Lash Roads, who had been ousted as the chairwoman of the Cedarville Rancheria, a federally recognized northern Pyute tribe, walked into a tribal eviction meeting at the Rancheria office in Alurus.

[00:16:09]She was under federal investigation for approximately $50,000 in missing funds.

[00:16:16]The eviction meeting was about her. She opened fire with a 9mm handgun. When she ran out of ammunition, she pulled out a butcher knife.

[00:16:25]By the time the police arrived, four people were dead. They included her brother, Rurick Davis, who was 50 years old, her niece, Angel Penn, who was 19 and holding her newborn baby on her lap when she was shot, her nephew, Glenn Konico, who was 30, and the tribal administrator Sheila Lin Russo, who was 47.

[00:16:45]The baby survived. Roads was sentenced to death in April 2017, making her one of the only female mass shooters on California's death row. The Cedarville Rancheria has only around 6 to 35 enrolled members. The trauma in this community is generational. And yet, Cedarville keeps going. The Surprise Valley Joint Unified School District still runs kindergarten through 12 in town. The Surprise Valley Healthcare District still operates Cedarville Hospital on Main Street. Steven Kistler, the man who invented Aerogel and the Guinness record holder for the world's lightest solid, was born in Cedarville in 1900. People stay in Cedarville for the same reason people stay in any small town. Family, land, the feeling that this place is theirs.

[00:17:32]The dark things that happened here do not erase the love people have for the valley. They just sit underneath it quietly, the way grief does.

[00:17:43]Welcome to Trona, the smelliest, saltiest, most earthquake rattled town on this list. Located in Sirill Valley in San Bernardino County, 170 mi northeast of Los Angeles, Trona is southwest of Death Valley and 24 mi from the nearest Walmart in Rididgerest.

[00:18:02]The town smells like rotten eggs. I am not exaggerating. The Surls Valley Minerals Plant owned by the Indian conglomerate Nurma extracts borax, soda ash, and salt from the dry lake bed at a rate of about 1.75 million tons per year.

[00:18:18]The byproduct is a constant lowgrade sulfur smell that hangs over the entire valley. And somehow it gets worse.

[00:18:28]Trona High School has the only dirt football field in the United States. The team is called the Tornadoes and they play home games on a field where nothing will grow because the soil is too saline. The field is called the Pit. It has been featured in the New York Times, Good Morning America, and on National Network Television.

[00:18:47]The last graduating class CNN reported on had 13 students.

[00:18:52]Then came the earthquakes. On July 4th, 2019, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the area. The next day, July 5th, 2019, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake followed.

[00:19:06]Then came over 14,000 aftershocks in just 11 days. Roughly 50 homes in Trona were damaged. Gas leaks broke out.

[00:19:15]Rocklides cut all roads into town. Water manes shattered.

[00:19:20]Jojo Tommpkins, a resident, summed up why people stay. She said, "You got hurricanes on the east, tornadoes in the middle, and earthquakes on the west.

[00:19:30]Where are you going to run to? Linda Funka said, "We are still trrona strong.

[00:19:36]We are going to come back."

[00:19:38]Dave Garrison, another resident, was less optimistic. He said, "Ma, I do not expect this town will be much more than a living ghost town in another 10 or 15 years."

[00:19:51]He might be right. In February of 2026, Sirills Valley Minerals announced 300 layoffs at its soda ash and boric acid operations, blaming competition from Chinese producers.

[00:20:04]A resident named William Stevens told ABC7 Los Angeles, "A lot of people are already putting their houses up for sale and getting out of here. It's definitely a shell shocker."

[00:20:14]The peak population of Trona was around 7,000.

[00:20:19]Today, it is somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 and dropping fast.

[00:20:25]The family dollar pulled out after the earthquake. There is a single sit-down restaurant left. But the people who stay are not the kind of people who leave just because a place gets hard. They are the descendants of miners who came here a 100 years ago. They live in houses they own outright. They watch their kids play on a dirt football field and they call it home.

[00:20:47]That is the kind of stubborn America was built on. And Trrona is one of the last places you can still see it standing. If you have made it this far and you are enjoying this, do me a small favor and hit the like button. It actually helps the algorithm find people who love weird American history as much as you do. We are about to get into the truly strange ones.

[00:21:08]If you take highway 190 east toward Death Valley and turn off down a long, lonely spur road, you will eventually reach Darwin.

[00:21:17]Population 36, median age 66. There is no gas station. There is no grocery store. There is no cell service. The internet is patchy satellite when it works at all. The nearest grocery run is a 70m round trip to Lone Pine or Ridgerest.

[00:21:34]The town's water supply, which comes from Darwin Wash, is failing. It can only support about 35 people sustainably, which is roughly the entire population.

[00:21:43]At the entrance to town, residents have posted a sign that says, "No services ahead." It is not a warning. It is a request. They do not want visitors. They want to be left alone.

[00:21:56]Now, the real question is, what happened behind closed doors that made these people choose this?

[00:22:02]Kathy Goss, a writer and musician who is about 75 years old, moved to Darwin from San Francisco in 1997.

[00:22:10]Her roommate in San Francisco was murdered. She wanted to disappear.

[00:22:15]So she did. She now runs a summer music camp out of Darwin and wrote a memoir in the local desert patto called Darwin Diaries.

[00:22:25]Recently she joked that Darwin's no kings protest was probably the largest in California by percentage.

[00:22:32]Monty Brangan has lived there for more than 55 years.

[00:22:37]He says Darwin was no town to raise kids in, that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.

[00:22:43]Hank and Connie Jones are pagans who believe Odin is their universal god.

[00:22:49]Their stepson Riyle, a transgender man, said after moving there that he is happier than he has ever been.

[00:22:56]John Hamilton in his mid 80s is the caretaker at the old anaconda mine and a full-time painter.

[00:23:03]Darwin was the subject of a 2011 documentary called Darwin by Nick Brandistini which premiered on the Tribeca circuit in the 1870s. Darwin was so violent that one historian wrote that at one time there were more bad men and desperados in that town than in any town of its size in the world.

[00:23:24]For context, that was more violent than Deadwood, South Dakota at its peak.

[00:23:31]A smallox epidemic in 1878 and an arsonist who burned the hotel in 1879 reduced a population of 3,500 to almost nothing.

[00:23:44]And now in 2026, Darwin is in the news again because it is begging young people to move in.

[00:23:52]Homes are a fraction of California's average price.

[00:23:57]The catch, of course, is that you have to actually want to live in Darwin, which means you need to be the kind of person who reads about Kathy Goss and thinks that sounds nice.

[00:24:07]I want that. If that is you, the town has been waiting.

[00:24:12]Sema sits in the heart of Mojave National Preserve between the Ivonpa and Providence Mountains at 4,175 ft elevation.

[00:24:23]The SEMA store and post office, which served the entire scattered community, closed in 2011.

[00:24:30]The town is now considered officially a ghost town. A handful of ranchers, railroad workers, and caretakers still live in and around Sema.

[00:24:40]The SEMA grade, the steepest section of the Union Pacific Railroads main line between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, runs right through. Freight trains rumble past 24 hours a day. But here's the detail everyone missed at the time. On August 15th, 2020, a lightning strike at a place called Deer Spring on Simodome started what became known as the Dome Fire. It burned 43,273 acres and in the process it killed an estimated 1.3 million Joshua trees.

[00:25:15]That's not a typo. 1.3 million. The Sema Dome had been the largest, densest Joshua tree forest on Earth. And in a few days of August heat, most of it was gone.

[00:25:27]3 years later, in 2023, the York Fire burned another 100,000 acres in the same region.

[00:25:35]The town's founder, a man named Herbert Graham Gibson, opened the SEMA store way back in 1900 and famously refused to pump customers gas, possibly making it the first self-service gas station in America.

[00:25:49]He died long ago. The store is closed.

[00:25:52]The post office is closed. But the people who remain are stubborn in the way only desert people can be.

[00:25:59]Volunteers have been replanting Joshua trees on Sema Dome for years now. They take 100 years to mature. The trees being planted today will not fully recover until the people planting them are long gone. They are doing it anyway because someone has to because somebody loved this place enough to bring it back, even knowing they will not live to see it whole again. That's the kind of devotion you can't fake. And it's why a handful of people still call Sema home.

[00:26:27]Bombay Beach sits on the east shore of the Sultan Sea in Imperial County, 223 ft below sea level. It is officially the lowest community in the United States.

[00:26:37]Its population is 231.

[00:26:40]There is no gas station. There is no grocery store. There is exactly one restaurant called the Ski in with Anthony Bourdain's face painted on the wall because he raved about their patty melt. Emergency services can take up to 2 hours to arrive. The nearest gas is 20 m away, which is why most residents drive electric golf carts everywhere. In the 1950s and the 1960s, this was the California Riviera.

[00:27:08]Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and the Beach Boys vacationed at the Sultan Sea.

[00:27:13]The water sparkled. The marinas were full. Then, Hurricane Kathleen flooded the town in 1976.

[00:27:21]The lakes salinity skyrocketed in the 1980s. And the fish started dying by the millions. The resorts closed. The dream collapsed.

[00:27:33]But then artists found Bombay Beach. The annual Bombay Beach Bonale started in 2016 and now draws international artists, filmmakers, and academics who install bizarre sculptures across the town's abandoned lots.

[00:27:50]The town has been featured in the season 6 premiere of The Mentalist, in Lincoln Park's Minutes to Midnight album, Art, and in a Tribeca Prize-winning documentary by Alma Harel.

[00:28:02]Lots that sold for under $1,000 in 2010 now list for 20,000 or more.

[00:28:09]Candace Youngberg moved to Bombay Beach full-time in 1994. She wants to plant hundreds of trees and throw a centennial party in 2029.

[00:28:19]She told reporters, "We were forgotten for a long time. We exist. There's still people that live here full-time, and we need help. That's Bombay for you. We don't give up. We fix it. We'll figure out a way." Tala Satell moved to Bombay Beach in 2022 from a six-f figureure accounting career. Her quote is the one that sticks with me. She said, "Before I made six figures, owned a townhouse, and had a gravy boat that matched my dinner plates.

[00:28:49]Now I live in a single wide trailer, but I'm so much happier." She tends bar at the ski in now. Of course, there's a darker side to Bombay Beach. The salt and sea is shrinking by 10 ft every two decades. Toxic windblown dust from the exposed playa has elevated childhood asthma rates across the entire region.

[00:29:10]The San Andreas fault terminus runs directly through town. A federal mitigation deal in 2022 allocated $250 million to fix the sea and the first habitat ponds began filling in 2025.

[00:29:26]Bombay Beach is the strangest small town in California and possibly the most honest one. It's a community of people who looked at a slowly dying lake in a toxic dust storm and decided to make art instead of leaving. The Mad Max scenery, the painted ruins, the people drinking beer at the ski in at 4 in the afternoon while a sculpture made of broken televisions glints in the desert sun.

[00:29:51]You either get Bombay Beach immediately or you'll never understand it.

[00:29:56]We've reached the most isolated inhabited town on this list.

[00:30:01]Population four. Death Valley Junction sits at the intersection of Highway 127 and Highway 190 in Inyo County, 27 mi southeast of Furnus Creek and Death Valley National Park. The Nevada State Line is 5 mi away. The entire town is a U-shaped 1923 adobe complex originally built by the Pacific Coast Borax Company. There is no grocery store.

[00:30:27]There is no gas station. There is no bar. The nearest gas is in Pahrump, Nevada, 30 mi away. Las Vegas is 90 mi east. And yet, this place is the reason this entire video exists. Because in March of 1967, a New York trained ballerina named Marta Beckett got a flat tire here. While her husband fixed it, she wandered around the abandoned town and peered through the keyhole of an old building called Corkill Hall. In her own words, she heard the building say to her, "Take me. Do something with me. I offer you life." So she did. She rented the building for $45 a month. And because she was worried about performing to empty seats, she spent the next 6 years painting an entire Renaissance audience onto the walls and ceiling.

[00:31:20]16th century Spanish royalty, dukes, duchesses, a king, a queen, all painted onto the plaster in extraordinary detail so that she would never dance to an empty room again.

[00:31:33]And then she danced for them. Ballet, mime, original choreography, sometimes to live music, sometimes to recorded tracks, sometimes to nothing at all.

[00:31:45]for 45 years. National Geographic stumbled onto her in 1970 mid-p performance with no human audience present.

[00:31:54]The story went international. Real people started showing up, including Ray Bradbury and Red Skeleton. David Lynch filmed parts of Lost Highway there. The 2020 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand was filmed there.

[00:32:09]Robert Plant shot the music video for Big Log Inside. A 2000 documentary about Marta won an Emmy for cinematography.

[00:32:17]Marta Beckett performed her last show at the Amarosa Opera House on February 12th, 2012.

[00:32:23]She was 87 years old. She passed away in 2017. Her painted audience is still there. The opera house still operates.

[00:32:32]An ex Oakland ballet dancer named Jenna Mcccleintoch moved to Death Valley Junction in 2015 to keep Marta's repertoire alive.

[00:32:41]The hotel still rents rooms to travelers. Tours run twice a day. Wild horses managed by the Bureau of Land Management. Wander through the back of the property. And four people somehow still call this place home in 2026.

[00:32:56]If you ever drive through the Mojave at dusk and you see lights flickering on the horizon in the middle of nothing, that is Death Valley Junction.

[00:33:04]A single ballerina built a life out of a derelict company town. And 45 years later, the audience she painted is still watching.

[00:33:13]Sometimes that is all a town needs to survive.

[00:33:17]One person stubborn enough, weird enough, in love enough with a place to keep its lights on.

[00:33:23]So that is the list.

[00:33:26]12 California towns that should not exist but do. If you enjoyed this one, hit subscribe and stick around.

[00:33:35]We have more videos exactly like this coming every week. Breaking down the strange, the cheap, the beautiful, and the forgotten corners of America.