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3-22-11

This is not an ordinary ghost town. Built as a water district base camp in 1930 and active until 1937 while the water district burrowed a tunnel below the mountain range, bringing water to southern California, this secluded location was built using a lot of concrete, but all that remains are foundations, stairs and a few walls.
All of the buildings were built with some concrete, mostly foundations and retaining walls, some with concrete footers the top 80 to 90% being wood, wood which was long ago either salvaged or carried away by somebody. This leaves the skeletal remains of concrete and precious little old lumber.

Most of the visitors to this ghost town come to shoot their shotguns, and this being being BLM land, this activity is entirely legal, but unfortunately many who do come here to shoot also leave behind a lot of spent shells, shotgun and rifle shells, as well as some garbage, but not as much regular garbage as one would expect. There's also a couple of vehicles in the ravine just west of the camp, most of which are rusted and bullet pocked,  having been in the ravine a long time, they either having been stolen and stripped or otherwise discarded. In addition there's also a newer dodge ram cab in the ravine which was obviously stripped first then slid over the edge. If I had to guess, I'd say it was a stolen vehicle. All of these vehicles are missing their motors, VIN plates and anything of value. I know, I hiked down the ravine for an up close look. The Dodge Ram cab does still have a body stamping ID number on the bottom though, so if you're missing a late model Ram Pickup... or an old Nissan, an LTD or Chevy Monza...

Naturally we did what we always do on any excursion, we cleaned up after ourselves, left no trash, and even cleaned up some of the previous visitor's mess, consisting mostly of shotgun shells. Always leave a site better than you find it, that is our policy. Always has been.

About this trip
We decided early on to make this a multi-task trip. We'd get there early, do some shooting, do some artifact hunting with the metal detectors, learn everything we could about this ghost town based on the foundations and remaining structures, such as what was where etc., have dinner then do a ghost hunt. Not a paranormal investigation, but a ghost hunt, as the objective was to see if anyone stayed behind at this location. If we found activity, then we could then ramp it up to an investigation, but we had to find activity first.

We arrived about noon after traversing some roads which are best handled with four wheel drive (I've read that cars can make it up to Berdoo camp from Indio, and I've read that high clearance and 4 wheel drive is a must, and I highly your vehicles have high ground clearance at the least, and it's not a bad idea for it to be 4 wheel drive as well.

We got some baseline pictures of the buildings and foundations, then started target shooting. You'll see in some of the pictures we have that people do shoot up the concrete walls quite a bit up here, mostly likely using high powered rifles judging by the divots in the concrete, and this is not something we do nor condone. This is a historic, largely forgotten location which should be preserved for future generations in my opinion. Some people also exercise their artistic side with cans of spray paint, further defacing the locations. I can't get too worked up in neither case, the rounds expended on the concrete nor the painting. After all, it looks as if the BLM or the water district pretty much leveled this site after they were done with it anyway. The wooden parts were salvaged, many concrete walls were knocked down, their steel reinforcements severed with welding torches.

We set up our shooting area over the west ravine (the one with the cars below) and began shooting biodegradable skeet. Not many of them made it to the ground whole. We went back to do more of this throughout the day as well, and later in the day we had a skeet shooting contest in which everyone shot well, Chris coming out the champ. There will be a rematch.

When I walked down into the ravine later to look at the destroyed vehicles is that the pock marks all over these cars and trucks were not caused by shotgun blasts, but rather high powered rifles, serious bullets, in other words. I found an old gas tank which was pocked with holes, and that I know I shot from above with a shotgun, and the pellets merely bounced off the metal leaving little clean spots on the rusted metal. A little later Perry met me down into the ravine (the man is a two legged mountain goat!) and we spent some time exploring. We also tipped the Dodge Ram cab back to upright. Just seemed the right thing to do.

 
Later we had dinner at the location, and as the sun set we started setting up for the ghost hunt.
One of the things about hunting ghosts, besides making you hungry (it does that to me anyway) is that it can be very tedious, boring even, especially if you're not getting any "hits" on anything, gauges, impressions of imprints, photo anomalies. After the excitement of having shot off 500 or so rounds over the course of the day, the tedious is even more tedious, but we all hung in there until late in the night, braving the low temperatures (with the help of some hot chocolate).

The Hunt
The area we wanted to start off at was the former hospital, and we spent a lot of time walking the camp looking for which foundation or section this would have been. Honestly, there's just no telling which building had been the hospital, so we chose the building (s) which still had walls, but more importantly also had ramps, like you'd see at as hospital, even an old one. Wheels chairs are a drag to take up stairs, so this made sense. It turns out we were right on the mark, that structure indeed having been the hospital. Why were we so interested in the hospital? Hospital's tend to have a lot of imprints, those of suffering, humane care, deaths, etc., and a as a target of a work camp I can scarcely think of a better target.
We started outside at the top of the wheelchair ramp in an area where we had found anomalous EMF readings earlier in the day when we checked our baseline readings. Nothing occurred at all in this area on the hunt, not even a repeat of the EMF spikes, although the Paranormal PX Ovilus was fairly active, spouting it's usual litany. Later we moved into the (almost) four walls of what used to be part of the inside of the hospital. This got us out of the wind, at least.

Still not much happened, so we stopped for a bit, made some luke warm chocolate (we wanted hot chocolate, but whatcha gonna do...) then followed up on a earlier lead in which Steve had gotten the impression of a man who was extremely happy. An impression, or imprint, or place memory, whatever term you want to use, is not a spirit, but rather a memory left behind in the surroundings. Many times it is an intense memory, extreme anguish (think Anne Boleyn) and sometimes it's extreme joy. This imprint was the good, happy kind.The man was walking east behind what we call the cafeteria (might have been a dorm) carrying a lunch pail, wearing a sort of hard hat, suspenders, wearing a tool belt, and he was almost overflowing in joy that it was now "Happy Time." Not knowing what this meant, we traveled back to this area later to see if we could get any answers. One of the curious things that did pop up when we asked this question at the same spot Steve had picked up the imprint was the Ghost Radar saying "Bar." Well, if it were the 30's and I was digging a tunnel in the middle of nowhere with nothing but grubby men around, I think I'd be pretty danged happy to be going into town, to a bar, to see my family, or whatever. This is what we think this imprint was about.

The only problem we had at this location was when it came time to get out of there. As you can see, we came prepared with four wheel drive and plenty of ground clearance, but navigating out of there would be tricky in the dark. There are several areas where the road simply does not exist anymore, and lots of Y's in the road that can get you good and lost, or sitting at the end of a trail. And yes, this happened quite a few times, but obviously we made it out ok.