We arrived in the Victorville/ Adelanto area a couple of days ago, just north of LA in the Mojave Desert.
It’s been quite a surprising find. And I thought it was just going to be a hokey hicktown.

For starters the weather has been fun in itself. They had a huge snowfall out here & seeing the desert covered in snow with the cacti sticking out is still a novelty.

Nik & I went out to El Mirage the other day to see the famous dry lake (you’ve seen it in many films etc, famous for being a giant super-flat piece of land with crackly ground), well it turns out the “lake” area is closed due to the snowy roads etc so we couldn’t go in.

So we took a leaf out of this family’s book, parked the car & played in the snow.

This is our snowman, his name is El Frosto, guardian of El Mirage.

We used cookies for his eyes .. then Nik ate them so we redecorated him.

I believe these are rabbit tracks.

Nearby to El Mirage were some airplane graveyards. We found a small lot where we could get close to the fence, to see the chopped up planes (I’m guessing to reuse parts).

In the background of the last couple of pics you can almost see the larger plane graveyard down the street where they keep a huge amount of planes, but we couldn’t get too close due to the weather. We drove alongside the fence on a dirt road, but since the road was so muddy & slushy we were close to getting the car stuck & in the middle of nowhere it was a bit of a worry, so we turned back. ..Security was starting to watch us too.

These look like cat prints to me, big ones..

On our way back from the airplane graveyard we came across this place quite randomly..

An abandoned town. We didn’t know what we had stumbled into … especially when we saw these signs all-over the place.

The warning starts- Air in the buildings of this area contain chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer & reproductive toxicity…

All the buildings had smashed windows/walls.

It turns out the place is a military training facility. It was once a real neighbourhood with residents, but became vacant & then was used by the army to run around, do tactical training, test weapons etc. Really strange that we just came across it quite by accident. It was like stumbling into a zombie movie or Silent Hill or something.

Eventually a security guard started following us & approached us to leave. What a weird experience.. like, I knew these places existed but I didn’t expect them to be so close to humanity what with all the weapons & “cancerous chems”, nevermind the fact we just drove in, no fence or anything to keep us out. Across the freeway is the federal prison too. A bit of a creepy area huh?