EAGLE MOUNTAIN

In the desert east of Joshua Tree, Henry J. Kaiser built a town to feed his steel mills. Starting in the late 1940s, Kaiser Steel dug iron ore out of Eagle Mountain, California and shipped it by private railroad to its plant in Fontana. Eagle Mountain was a full company town, with houses, a school, a pool, churches, and a shopping center, home to about 4,000 people at its peak. In 1983 the mine closed as American steel collapsed. The town emptied almost overnight. Nearby town of Desert Center remained, but the loss of Eagle Mountain dealt it a slow death.

For a while a private prison moved into the old buildings, and then that closed too. For years, Los Angeles-area officials planned to fill the mine pits with the region’s garbage, until a long legal fight killed the project. More recently, developers have proposed turning the pits into a huge hydroelectric storage reservoir. Eagle Mountain keeps getting reimagined by people who don’t live there.

What remains is strange and quiet. Paved streets sit in a grid with nothing on them. Driveways lead to empty slabs. A ball field is going back to desert. Above it all, the mountain has been cut into giant terraces, a man-made canyon that’s still visible from space. The desert light is harsh and beautiful, and it makes the abandonment look clean, almost peaceful. Photographing Eagle Mountain means standing in the full shape of an American town with all of its people gone.