When the Marines finished with Camp Dunlap in 1946, they left behind a city of concrete — hundreds of slabs poured across the Imperial County desert to support tents, ranges, and infrastructure for one of the largest training installations in the American West. The government eventually deeded the land back to California. The slabs stayed. And so, in time, did the people who came to live on them.
Camp Dunlap opened on October 15, 1942, named for Brigadier General Robert H. Dunlap. At 250,000 acres, it was one of the most extensive Marine training facilities built during World War II, carved from the Imperial County desert to serve the Fleet Marine Force's need for artillery and anti-aircraft instruction. The construction came from Vinson and Pringle and the Del E. Webb Construction Company — the same Phoenix firm that also built Marine Corps Air Station El Centro and Marine Corps Air Station Mojave. Within its perimeter, the base held five distinct tent camps and eight artillery ranges, an architecture of destruction designed to send men overseas prepared.
During the war, the 10th, 11th, and 13th Marine Regiments moved through Camp Dunlap before shipping out to the Pacific. Bombers from the nearby Marine Corps Air Station El Centro used the desert around the camp as a live ordnance range. By the end of 1945, the Marines began dismantling the installation. The base officially closed in March 1946 and was handed to the Naval Real Estate Board. In 1951, the California State Lands Commission sold 11,342 acres to the Navy for token compensation, retaining mineral rights and the condition that the land revert to state ownership when the Navy withdrew. In October 1961, the Department of Defense returned the land to California.
What the military left behind was not nothing. Hundreds of concrete slabs — the foundations of a wartime city — remained scattered across the desert at the site that became known as Slab City. Over the decades, the slabs attracted squatters, artists, veterans, retirees, and anyone who needed or wanted to live entirely outside conventional infrastructure. Today, Slab City is an unincorporated community of a few hundred permanent residents and many seasonal visitors, entirely off the grid, entirely without services. It has a library built from salvaged materials, an outdoor music venue called The Range, and the painted hill monument called Salvation Mountain. Camp Dunlap trained men for combat. Slab City became, improbably, a monument to the opposite impulse — the desire to live with absolute minimal footprint in a place the government no longer wanted.
Located at 34.23°N, 116.27°W in Imperial County, California. The Salton Sea is visible to the southwest, a useful landmark. The grid of Slab City, on the site of the former Camp Dunlap, is visible from above as a pattern of roads and scattered structures in flat desert. Nearest airports: Brawley Municipal (BWC) ~35 miles southwest, El Centro Naval Air Facility (NJK) ~45 miles south.