Baker, California
Near Zzyzx, California
Baker exists because of a railroad and a temperature record. The town was founded in nineteen oh eight as a water and fuel stop on the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad, which hauled borax out of the Mojave. It was named for Richard C.
Baker, a partner in building that line. For decades Baker sat at the junction of two desert highways as a survival stop: gas, water, and a diner before the long run across the Mojave toward Las Vegas or down into Death Valley. Then in nineteen ninety-one, a local entrepreneur named Willis Herron erected a thermometer alongside the highway.
It stands one hundred and thirty-four feet tall, a height chosen to honor the one hundred and thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit recorded in Death Valley in nineteen thirteen, the hottest air temperature ever documented on Earth. The first thermometer blew down in high winds. Herron rebuilt it in concrete, at a cost of seven hundred fifty thousand dollars.
It still stands, reading the air above Baker, a monument to heat in the hottest corner of the continent.
