Narka, California

Narka sat roughly 3.5 miles south of present-day Little Lake, on the Jawbone Branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad, in the long volcanic corridor between the Coso Range and the Sierra Nevada. It existed for a single reason: to off-load lumber, cement, pipe, and men for the Los Angeles Aqueduct construction camp at nearby Soda Hill. For four years it had a post office, a name on a map, and a steady rhythm of freight cars. Then the aqueduct opened, the contracts ended, and the desert began the slow work of taking it back.

01A Railroad Siding Built for William Mulholland's Aqueduct

The Los Angeles Aqueduct broke ground in October 1908 under chief engineer William Mulholland, and within a year its labor force had ballooned from roughly 2,600 workers to more than 6,000. Moving that many men and that much material across 200 miles of desert required a railroad, and the city contracted Southern Pacific to build a 118-mile line from the cement mills at Monolith, near Mojave, north to Olancha at the south end of Owens Valley. Over the project's lifetime that line would haul 14 million ton-miles of freight.

Narka was one of the numbered sidings stitched along that route. According to David L. Durham's California place-name research, which Wikipedia draws on, the siding was created in February 1909 specifically to support the aqueduct camp at Soda Hill. A post office opened the same year. For the construction crews working the southern divisions of the aqueduct, Narka was the nearest place to receive a letter from home.

02What Was Life Like at a Construction Siding?

There is no surviving photograph of Narka that has surfaced in the digitized historical record, and no census ever counted it. What can be reconstructed comes from the standard pattern of Owens Valley aqueduct camps: tent platforms and a few board-and-batten shacks clustered around the rail spur, a water tank, a cookhouse, and the post office that doubled as a company store. The aqueduct's eleven construction divisions each operated camps like this, populated by a rotating cast of teamsters, powdermen, mule skinners, and Greek and Mexican laborers who drilled the tunnels for a few dollars a day.

Narka's distinction was simply that it came first in this stretch of desert. The Wikipedia entry notes that Narka began as a railroad camp before Little Lake was settled. When travelers later spoke of Little Lake as the older settlement, they had the sequence backwards. The siding predated the town. Bramlette, as Little Lake was originally called, grew up around a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dam built in 1905, but the cluster of buildings that became the modern hamlet only consolidated after Narka's traffic began drawing services northward.

03The Post Office Closes and the Traffic Moves North

The aqueduct was completed in November 1913. That same year, the U.S. Post Office Department closed the Narka office and transferred its service to Little Lake. The reasoning was practical: with construction over, the Soda Hill camp emptied out, and Little Lake, sitting directly on the emerging automobile route between Los Angeles and Lake Tahoe, had a future that Narka did not. A 1912 auto-route map published for early motorists still showed Narka in the upper-left margin, but it was already a vestigial label.

The siding itself lingered for another two decades as a convenience for ranchers and the occasional mining shipment. Narka was formally abandoned on March 15, 1935, a date specific enough to suggest a Southern Pacific paperwork action rather than a dramatic closure. The Jawbone Branch tracks themselves were pulled up by 1981.

04Can You Visit Narka Today?

Practically speaking, no. Narka has no standing structures, no marker, no preserved foundations, and no public access point identified in any historical inventory the author could locate. The site lies in open desert roughly 3.5 miles south of Little Lake, in country now crossed by frontage roads and the realigned U.S. 395 corridor. Even Little Lake itself, the larger settlement that absorbed Narka's mail in 1913, has been almost entirely erased: its 1923 stone hotel burned in 1989, the post office closed in 1997, and by 2001 the townsite had been restored to bare ground, leaving only the namesake spring-fed lake behind a chain-link fence.

Visitors driving U.S. 395 between Inyokern and Olancha pass within a few miles of the Narka site without any indication it ever existed. The volcanic tableland here, dotted with cinder cones and the obsidian flows that drew Native Coso knappers for thousands of years, looks today much as it did before the aqueduct crews arrived.

05What Remains of Narka Today

What remains of Narka is essentially documentary. The siding's name survives in Southern Pacific timetables, in Durham's place-name dictionary, and in the brief Wikipedia entry that catalogs it among the lost settlements of Inyo County. No buildings stand. The rails are gone. The post office records, four years of them, sit in the National Archives. The aqueduct that Narka was built to feed still flows south to Los Angeles, carrying Owens Valley water past the unmarked patch of desert where the camp once stood, an arrangement the residents of Inyo County have not stopped contesting in more than a century. In that sense Narka's purpose outlived the town by a wide margin. The water still moves. The siding does not.