Slab City: Camp Dunlap's Afterlife

In nineteen forty-two, the United States Marine Corps built a training base near Niland on this flat stretch of southern California desert. It was called Camp Dunlap. After the war, the Marines demolished the structures and left. What they left behind were the concrete slab foundations.

In the nineteen-fifties, retirees traveling in RVs discovered that the slabs were convenient places to park. Flat, stable, out of the way of anyone who might ask them to leave. The Bureau of Land Management, which owned the land, was not in the habit of enforcing its claims on this particular stretch of desert. The retirees told other retirees. A winter community formed.

Slab City grew slowly from a seasonal RV destination into a year-round settlement. The people who stayed were not a single type. There were retirees who had run out of money, artists who needed cheap space, people who had philosophical objections to utility bills and property taxes, people who had arrived for a winter and never found a reason to leave. There was no electricity from the grid, no water service, no garbage collection. That was the point, for many of the people there.

The community calls itself the Last Free Place. Whether that framing holds up under scrutiny depends on what you mean by free. It is genuinely outside the grid. It is genuinely without municipal services. It is also on BLM land, which means it exists at the continuing tolerance of the federal government, and that tolerance has not been unlimited.

Slab City is still there. Salvation Mountain, which you may have just passed, is at its edge. The slabs that the Marines poured in nineteen forty-two are still under the campers and the art installations and the people who have decided, for whatever reason, that this is where they want to be.