Gerstley, California

01The Borax Kings Behind the Name

Gerstley was christened around 1921 by Francis Marion Smith, the Oakland mining magnate better known as "Borax Smith," who had built the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad to haul ore from his Pacific Coast Borax Company mines east of Death Valley. Smith named the siding in honor of his business associate James Gerstley, Sr. (1867-1955). The two men, along with Richard C. Baker, had co-founded Borax Consolidated, Ltd. in 1899, a British-American combine that effectively controlled the world's borax trade from offices in London. Gerstley himself never lived at the California place that carried his name; he was an executive, not a desert hand. His son, James M. Gerstley, later rose to the presidency of U.S. Borax & Chemical Company, and in 1957 a newly identified mineral discovered at Boron was named gerstleyite in the family's honor.

Smith had incorporated the Tonopah and Tidewater in 1904 and opened it in 1907, pushing roughly 200 miles of track from Ludlow on the Santa Fe main line northeastward through the Amargosa Canyon toward Beatty, Nevada. Sidings like Gerstley were the capillaries of that system, spur points where ore wagons and, later, narrow-gauge tramways met the standard-gauge rails headed for the refineries.

02A Prospector, a Cave, and a Colemanite Strike

The ore body that gave Gerstley its reason for being was reportedly discovered in 1922 by a prospector named Johnny Sheridan, who, according to one account preserved in regional mining lore, lived in a cave in the Resting Spring Range alongside the local wildlife. The deposit he stumbled into was a bedded lacustrine borate laid down in Tertiary lake sediments and capped by basalt, roughly 85 percent colemanite and 15 percent ulexite. Pacific Coast Borax acquired the claim and developed what became known as the Gerstley Mine, a short distance east of the railroad in the southern end of the Resting Spring Range.

To get the ore to the Tonopah and Tidewater, PCB built a narrow "baby gauge" rail line linking the mine workings to the siding at Gerstley. For a few years in the 1920s the arrangement worked. Then, in October 1927, the company closed the operation, pulled up the small-gauge rails and rolling stock, and shipped them off to equip its new and far larger mine at Boron on the Mojave Desert floor. The richer, more accessible Boron deposit would eventually become the centerpiece of U.S. Borax's global business. Gerstley, by contrast, fell quiet.

03What Happened to Gerstley, California?

The closure of the mine was only the first blow. The second was the death of the railroad itself. The Tonopah and Tidewater, which had never turned consistent profits, filed for abandonment with the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1940. When the United States entered the Second World War the following year, the War Department requisitioned the T&T's rails and equipment for use in Europe, and the contractor Sharp and Fellows spent nearly a year pulling up the desert line. By 1943 the tracks were gone; by 1946 the company was formally dissolved. The siding that had defined Gerstley simply evaporated.

The mine, however, was not entirely finished. Operators returned intermittently over the following decades to rework the colemanite beds, trucking ore overland to railheads rather than relying on the vanished T&T. The Gerstley I pit and the later Gerstley II workings passed through the hands of U.S. Borax and other operators before mining finally ceased at the end of the 1990s, a date the ghost-town record for the settlement gives as 1998. With the last trucks out, there was no longer any reason for anyone to live on the flat north of Shoshone.

04Can You Visit Gerstley Today?

The site sits in open desert country off State Route 127 between Shoshone and Death Valley Junction, within the zone of gravel roads, scattered claim markers, and creosote flats that define the southern approaches to Death Valley National Park. Shoshone, the nearest community, is a tiny census-designated place founded in 1910 by Ralph "Dad" Fairbanks and still family-owned; it offers the last gas, food, and post office before the park. From there, the Gerstley workings lie a short drive north. Visitors should be aware that the mine property and its tailings are on private or claim-controlled land and that the open pits and adits pose real hazards. The Amargosa River Trail, converted from a stretch of the old T&T grade between China Ranch and Tecopa, offers a legal and scenic way to walk a piece of the same railroad that once served Gerstley.

05What Remains of Gerstley Today

There is no townsite to speak of, no false-front main street, no cemetery with tilted wooden markers. Gerstley was a company siding, not a community, and when Pacific Coast Borax pulled its rails in 1927 the place was already more a name on a timetable than a town. What remains is industrial: the scars of the Gerstley I and Gerstley II pits in the Resting Spring Range, waste dumps of pale borate-bearing mudstone, the faint cut of the baby-gauge grade between mine and rail, and, running past it all, the unmistakable berm of the vanished Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad. For rockhounds, the name survives in another form entirely. "Gerstley borate," a raw calcium borate flux long favored by studio potters and mined here through the twentieth century, became so identified with the deposit that ceramicists still mourn its exhaustion. In that sense Gerstley, a ghost town now, lives on in glaze recipes from Seattle to Sydney, a small desert siding whose mineral outlasted its railroad, its post office prospects, and the men whose names it bore.