In fact, there are no laws in Slab City. It‘s a place for people who have lost their happiness, who want to escape society, and everyone in between. Its name comes from the concrete slabs left by the Marine Corps barracks at Camp Dunlap during World War II. Several campers, travelers and squatters occupy the area, many of whom are retired. This is primarily a community of snowbirds, meaning they stay in Slab City during the colder winter months before moving north in the summer. Temperatures during a Slab City summer can reach an unforgiving 48 degrees Celsius! The town of Perma-Burning Man was once a U.S. Navy camp. However, the abandoned land, located about 140 miles east of San Diego, is now a refuge for lawlessness. No one pays rent. No one enforces the rules. Prior to the official entry of the United States into World War II, the United States Marine Corps planned a training ground for field and anti-aircraft artillery units in an area accessible by aircraft taking off from aircraft carriers near San Diego.
[5] To create the training base, 631,345 acres (255,496 ha) were acquired. The government announced that the base would be named after Marine Corps Brigadier General Robert Henry Dunlap. After the construction of Camp Dunlap, it was commissioned on 15 October 1942. The camp had fully functional buildings, water, roads and sewage collections. The base was used for three years during the war. By 1949, military operations at Camp Dunlap had been drastically reduced, but a reduced crew continued until the base was dismantled.[5] By 1956, all the buildings had been dismantled, but the panels remained. [5] Many residents use generators or solar panels to generate electricity. Clean water is drained from a reservoir in the parish church. [22] The closest civilization body with proper law enforcement is located about 6.4 miles southwest of Slab City in Niland, where residents often went shopping starting in 1990.
[16] 30 years later, in 2020, residents were still receiving basic necessities from Niland, a town of about 1,000 people. [22] Slab City, also known as The Slabs, is an unincorporated, off-grid alternative lifestyle community[1] composed largely of snowbirds[2] in the Salton Trough area of the Sonoran Desert in Imperial County, California. It takes its name from the concrete slabs left behind after the demolition of the Dunlap training camp of the Marine Corps camp of World War II. [3] Slab City is known for attracting people who want to live outside the dominant society. [4] Hailey: Since Slab City was a relatively large military installation, I am impressed by the size of the infrastructure. Although it no longer functions as a base, the infrastructure of a functional city is still there – or at least some of the remnants – and yet it is completely off-grid in almost every aspect of services, but [the layout] is a grid. Ultimately, the plates themselves are the autonomous infrastructure that gave it its name. We were fascinated by the idea of concrete on sand.
Concrete is architecturally durable, and yet [the slabs] float on the sand. These are really invitations to the Rules of Procedure. They provide a floor and add some stability to an incredibly ephemeral place. Slab City also has more infrastructure than you might think at first glance: there‘s a river shower where you can swim, there‘s a library, a hostel with internet, there are tours, they have their own Facebook community page, and Amazon actually delivers to Slabs! Solar energy has definitely changed the game in slabs. A few years ago, electricity was a rare thing out there and worked exclusively from generators, but now many people have very beautiful and large solar systems that make off-grid life so much easier. Leonard Knight, one of the first settlers who created the art installation Salvation Mountain, was featured in Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild in 2007. An obituary of Knight states that he “spent nearly 30 years building the colorful mountain.[8] Built of clay and donated paint, Knight worked all day on the mountain, every day. He even slept at the foot of the mountain in the back of a van, without electricity or running water. [8] Ever since I heard about Slab City, a self-contained community in the middle of the Southern California desert, I‘ve been curious about what life is really like here.