Deep in California’s Anza-Borrego desert wilderness — an hour from the nearest town, miles from the nearest paved road, atop the rocky crags of a mountain stippled with razor cactus — is a house. Or the remains of one, at least, built and occupied for sixteen years by a noted writer and his family, who wanted to live off the land like Native Americans. Some people think Marshal South was crazy, others consider him an inspiration; one thing everyone can agree on is that he was interesting.

People wonder why South would build a house so far from civilization, and in such an unforgiving place — that is, until they hike the steep, mile-long trail to his old home site, and discover the views he enjoyed; the thin white roads and spectral light that spills across the Blair Valley is what earned Ghost Mountain its name.

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I took an unusual road trip yesterday, to a cemetery near the Mexican border. There’s nothing inherently unusual about visiting a cemetery, of course, except that in this case, I didn’t know anyone who was buried there. Technically speaking, no one does.

Some people call it the Juan Doe cemetery. It’s a potter’s field: hundreds of anonymous paupers’ graves, unadorned save for a single, dun-colored brick assigned to each, spread across a few muddy acres of ground on the outskirts of a one-horse farm town a few miles from California’s border with Mexico — the kind of place where residents have grown accustomed to desperate strangers knocking on their doors in the dead of night to beg for food and water. They are undocumented migrants, and those that don’t survive their journeys and cannot be identified end up here, among the indigent dead of Imperial County. It’s a sad and symbolic place, and one I wanted to see for myself.

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For most people, the word “fjord” conjures up thoughts of Scandinavia and the majestic, frozen North. But New Zealand, unbeknownst to many, can boast some of the world’s best fjords — hemmed by towering cliffs, fantastically deep and stretching like long, crooked fingers from the Tasman Sea into some of New Zealand’s most lush and remote scenery. They are to be found, appropriately enough, within an enormous and mostly unpopulated wilderness known as Fjordland. The easiest of the fjords to visit is Milford Sound, and I was fortunate to be able to take a two-day boat trip down the length of it a while back. This is what I found.

Pictured above is Mitre Peak, which towers nearly a mile above the surface of the water. The water in the glacier-carved fjord itself is some 1600 feet deep. The veritcal scale of everything in Milford is mind-boggling. (more…)

When most people picture Australia, the endless brown wastelands of the Outback come to mind; after all, it is the world’s driest country. But there’s a lesser-known landscape nestled far in the country’s remote northeast that’s anything but dry and barren; through the Wet Tropics of Far North Queensland run mighty rivers and dramatic waterfalls, ancient rainforests that house 18% of the nation’s bird population in just 0.2% of its landmass, and endure a mind-blowing 250 inches of rain a year — most of which falls between February and April. It also boasts some of Australia’s most beautiful beaches, which are just a dozen or so miles by boat or seaplane from the edge of the Great Barrier Reef.

Cape Tribulation is literally where the road ends — at least for any vehicle other than a heavy-duty 4×4 snorkle truck — and the Reef is how it got its name. Captain Cook ran aground on it on June 10, 1770, nearly sinking, and recorded in his log: that “the north point [was named] Cape Tribulation because here began all our troubles.” He had a bad time of it in the Wet Tropics, giving nearby landmarks colorful names like Mount Sorrow, Mount Awful and Weary Bay. That’s the other side of the coin when it comes to visiting Cape Tribulation, as I did last March — it’s beautiful and remote, but the potential dangers and pitfalls are many. Read on to see what I found there.

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I’ve written a lot about strange places in the U.S. this year — an airplane graveyard in the desert; a mock Iraqi village in the suburbs of San Diego; a town killed by a modern-day dustbowl two hours north of Los Angeles. But the strangest place I’ve ever been — the strangest and most beautiful, I should say — is a developing nation 1000km northeast of Australia, populated by the friendliest former cannibals you’ll ever meet, called Vanuatu. I wrote about it a little bit back in April, right after I returned from two weeks in country, but I’d had such a whirlwind trip, and taken thousands of pictures I’d hardly even begun to cull, that I needed six months or so to process just how profoundly different life in Vanuatu is.

It’s an archipelago comprised of 84 volcanic islands, each separated by many miles of shark-filled seas and unpredictable weather. Travel between islands is difficult and expensive, and as a result, to many of Vanuatu’s 200,000 citizens “international travel” means going to a nearby island every few years to visit cousins. They’ve had some exposure to foreigners — missionaries starting in the 19th century (some of whom were eaten); American soldiers during World War II, who established a base on the largest island to fend off the Japanese, stationed in the nearby Solomons; some British and French, who co-governed Vanuatu in a bizarre arrangement for many years; and tourists that come to a few of the islands nowadays (mostly from Australia, which is where they all assumed I was from). But even on the largest islands, which are mountainous and covered with tough-to-penetrate jungle, there are remote villages where locals have rarely, if ever, encountered outsiders. I didn’t make it quite that far afield, but I did find myself in a few off-the-beaten villages that were definitely not on the tourist trail, and luckily, I brought my camera.

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I spent a few weeks in Portugal during the spring of 2006, and one of the most striking things about its many churches and chapels and religious monuments was, well, how dark they were. Not literally — there was plenty of light. But it seemed like every statue of Christ was weeping blood, and every church had a display case of gruesome relics in the foyer; a saint’s pickled eyeballs here, a toe with dessicated skin still clinging to it there. But of all these monuments to pain and death, nothing could match the Capela dos Ossos — the Chapel of the Bones. Located next to the Church of St. Francis in the medieval town of Evora, it’s a large room decorated with the bones of more than 5,000 monks, exhumed from local churchyards to be used as building materials way back in the 16th century.

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At the turn of the last century, Goldfield was a mining boomtown — prospectors were pulling millions of dollars worth of ore out of the ground each year, and with a population that ballooned to more than 30,000 by 1904, it was the largest town in the state of Nevada. It was a classic Old West success story: gun-slinging heroes like Wyatt Earp trod its wooden sidewalks, and in a society where the real measure of a town’s worth was its bar-and-whorehouse scene, Goldfield had the rest beat: Tex Rickard’s Northern Saloon had a bar so long it required 80 bartenders to run it. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing about Goldfield if everything had kept going like gangbusters. By 1920s, the gold mines had started to peter out, and in 1923 a moonshine still exploded and started a fire that took most of the town’s wooden buildings with it. Today about 400 people remain in Goldfield, a semi-ghost town set among the barren wastes of Nevada’s high desert, surrounded by ghost stories and empty buildings — many of which are impressive stone and brick structures that survived the 1923 fire.

One of those buildings is Goldfield High School, built during the boom years in 1907. It graduated its last class in 1952, and has stood proud but shuttered ever since, impressive on the outside, decaying within. Over the past few years, a small team of dedicated volunteers has begun trying to save the high school, but restoring it to its former glory is a gargantuan task. Vandals and the elements have had their way with the building for many years, and it will take many more to lift it from the beautiful state of decay it’s in today.

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There are few landscapes in the United States lonelier than that of western Nevada. Towns — remote outposts connected by endless, thin ribbons of highway — are named for what miners used to pull out of the ground: Coaldale, Silverpeak, Goldfield. But the mining industry in places like Mineral County has largely disappeared, and with it, the towns it gave birth to. Those that aren’t ghost towns already cling precariously to life, burned-out and abandoned structures at their margins creeping inexorably toward the center like some scabrous and fatal disease. For many, it’s just a matter of time; even those hamlets that still have a few hundred people living in them are sometimes left off of state road maps. For someone who’s attracted to desolate places and question marks on big, empty-looking maps — someone like myself — this was a part of the country I had to see for myself.

There are many ghost and near-ghost towns in Mineral County — a county that boasts just 5,071 residents, or about one per square mile. 261 of those people live in Mina, a town named for a railroad executive’s daughter 100 years ago, which in Spanish means “ore.” The railroad and mining operations are long gone, and from the looks of things, at least half the town sits abandoned. Best known for a 1921 murder scandal that resulted in the world’s first execution by lethal gas, today Mina is a perfect example of a desert town on its way out.

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California can boast many superlatives: it contains the lowest point in the continental USA, the tallest, largest and oldest trees in the world, and it is the most populous state in the country. But to my mind, it also deserves the title of Home of the Weirdest Rocks, and it owes that honor to one rock in particular: the tufa. Essentially, it’s a common rock — limestone — that forms in uncommon circumstances — underwater. When calcium-rich underwater springs mix with lakewater rich in carbonates, a chemical reaction occurs which forms these impressive and bizarre-looking towers of limestone. Because they can only grow underwater, of course, the only places you can find tufa formations are places where there used to be a lake. California, as I’ve written about recently, is chock-full of those places, and two of them had just the right mix of calcium-rich springs and carbon-rich lakewater to form what have become nationally-recognized landmarks of geologic weirdness: Mono Lake and the Trona Pinnacles.

Pictured above are the Pinnacles, set in the midst of the baking-hot Searles Dry Lake Bed, a half-hour from Death Valley and the location for movies and television series like Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek V, Lost in Space and Planet of the Apes. It was also — according to conspiracy theorists — the location where NASA “staged” the moon missions. Below are the tufa at Mono Lake, exposed thanks to large amounts of water diverted to feed hungry lawns in a city four hours to the south (hint: they make movies there).

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There are a thousand ghost towns spread across the western United States — a whole constellation of loss and ruin — but most are little more than foundations, or at best a few tumbledown shacks, or if the people who lived and died there did anything of note, and if they’re lucky, a sun-faded commemorative plaque mounted on a squat stone pillar. The ghost town of Bodie, however, is another story altogether. A mining boomtown, it was the third most populous city in the state of California in 1880. By the 1940s sickness, wars, bad weather and exhausted mines had led to the town’s desertion, and its isolated, inhospitable location made certain that it stayed that way; no one eyed this high desert waste, 8,000 feet above sea level between Yosemite and the lonely Nevada border, and imagined a shopping mall in its place. Count us all lucky.

Only five percent of Bodie’s structures are still standing, but considering how large Bodie was, that’s still a lot for a ghost town — more than two hundred. And unlike Tombstone, Calico or any number of other “preserved” ghost towns in the West, it’s not a tourist trap where you can buy cotton candy from gunfight-staging actors playing oldey-timey cowboys; the town is kept in a state of “arrested decay,” which means the park rangers that patrol its dusty streets focus on making sure what’s left of Bodie doesn’t fall down, but they could care less about painting, weatherizing or cleaning up the decades-old trash that’s heaped everywhere. (more…)