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Category: Strange Places

  • The Underground Avenue Where 19th-Century Visitors Left Their Mark

    The Underground Avenue Where 19th-Century Visitors Left Their Mark

    Strange Places

    Deep inside Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, a passage called Gothic Avenue holds an unusually personal record of early American tourism. Its high limestone surfaces bear historic signatures, alongside artifacts and monuments left by visitors who came underground in the 1800s.

    Lantern-lit visitors walk through a broad limestone cave passage with Gothic-looking formations.
    Editorial illustration of a lantern-lit nineteenth-century cave visit.

    A name borrowed from the rock

    The National Park Service says Gothic Avenue received its name from formations that resembled Gothic architecture. The same passage became a destination during some of Mammoth Cave’s earliest nineteenth-century tourism. Today’s Gothic Avenue tour follows that history for about 1.7 miles, with guides discussing the people who visited, worked in, and shaped the cave’s public story.

    That combination makes the space feel like an underground guest book with very large margins. The historic record combines names, artifacts, and monuments from early visitors, while the broader cave landscape preserves evidence of tourism and other work across roughly two centuries.

    The guides were part of the landmark

    Many of the people whose names remain in Mammoth Cave were connected to the tours themselves. The park’s history of women at Mammoth Cave notes that George Slaughter Gatewood’s name appears more than a dozen times in Gothic Avenue, reflecting his repeated trips there as a guide. It also records that Charlotte Bishop’s signatures appear alongside those of her husband, Stephen Bishop, including in passages far from the entrance.

    A nineteenth-century cave guide holds a lantern and points toward historic markings on a limestone ceiling while visitors watch.
    Editorial illustration of the lantern-led tours that carried early visitors through Mammoth Cave.

    Those surviving marks offer a narrow but vivid trace of the people who moved through the cave. They also invite care. A historic inscription can be an artifact, while a new one can damage the same surface; the modern park experience centers on guided access and preservation.

    A wedding story, carefully framed

    Gothic Avenue also contains the dripstone columns known as the Bridal Altar. The National Park Service reports that several couples married there during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The park also shares an 1800s tale about a bride who promised her mother she would never marry any man “on the face of the earth” and then married below ground. The account belongs to the cave’s storybook layer, preserved as a period tale.

    A small nineteenth-century wedding gathering stands beside tall limestone dripstone columns in a lantern-lit cave chamber.
    Editorial illustration inspired by the Bridal Altar formations in Gothic Avenue.

    An archive that stays underground

    Mammoth Cave is widely known for its extraordinary length, yet Gothic Avenue offers a different kind of scale: a human one. Its formations supplied the architecture; tour guides supplied the route; visitors supplied the names and stories. The result is a peculiar historical room where geology, tourism, labor, and memory all occupy the same ceiling.

    Anyone planning a visit should check the park’s current cave-tour schedule and follow ranger guidance. The cave’s historic signatures and formations are part of a protected cultural landscape, best appreciated in place and left for the next visitor to discover.

    Sources

  • Zzyzx: The Desert Oasis Named to Have the Last Word

    Zzyzx: The Desert Oasis Named to Have the Last Word

    Zzyzx: The Desert Oasis Named to Have the Last Word

    Editorial illustration of a spring-fed pond, palms and a small desert resort beside the Mojave salt flats
    Editorial illustration: a Mojave oasis and the resort that gave Zzyzx its memorable name.

    Drivers crossing California’s Mojave Desert can spot an exit for a place called Zzyzx. The name looks like a keyboard tumble, but it belongs to a real spring-fed oasis with a story that moves from Indigenous use, to a radio preacher’s health resort, to a university field station.

    The springs, known as Soda Springs, sit in a landscape shaped by the much larger ancient Lake Mojave. As the region grew warmer and drier, the lake receded, leaving the salt flats of Soda and Silver lakes. Water remained at the springs, which the Mohave and Chemehuevi people used for generations. Explorers and the U.S. Army also stopped there in the 19th century, according to the National Park Service’s history of Zzyzx.

    A name made for the end of the alphabet

    In 1944, Curtis Howe Springer arrived at Soda Springs and developed a health resort on a mining claim. San Bernardino County’s history of the site says Springer chose “Zzyzx” as a promotional flourish: he wanted a name that would sound like “the last word” in health. The county gives the pronunciation as a rhyme with “Why-sik.”

    Springer built a miniature resort world in the desert. The National Park Service describes a two-story castle, dining hall, library, lecture room, pool house, goat farm and rooms for rabbits. Springer called himself “Doctor” and hosted a radio program that the Park Service says aired on more than 300 stations. His business mailed millions of packages of products with names such as Antediluvian Herb Tea and Hollywood Pep Cocktail; the nearby town of Baker added a post office to handle the volume.

    The resort’s story also has a clear cautionary chapter. Federal agencies challenged Springer’s land claims and product advertising, and he eventually left the site. The unusual place name endured, while the resort buildings found a new purpose.

    Editorial illustration of students observing waterbirds beside a spring-fed pond in the Mojave Desert
    Editorial illustration: a spring oasis supporting field study and birdlife in the Mojave.

    From radio resort to desert classroom

    Since 1976, the California State University Desert Studies Center has used Zzyzx as a field station for teaching and research. Its CSU Fullerton site describes a 1,280-acre station with classrooms, a laboratory, a small library, lodging and outdoor study spaces. The center works across desert ecology, geology and cultural history.

    The spring-fed water still makes this patch of desert a special stop for wildlife and people. The National Park Service says the public can visit Lake Tuendae and its picnic area; the occupied research buildings across the road are university property. A walk around the lake offers a glimpse of the oasis and a chance to imagine the odd resort that once filled its shores.

    Zzyzx is a reminder that a place can keep changing while its name stays wonderfully difficult to forget: ancestral spring, ambitious desert resort, and now a working outdoor classroom beneath one very distinctive exit sign.

  • Zzyzx: The Desert Name That Became a Landmark

    Zzyzx: The Desert Name That Became a Landmark

    All artwork in this story is an original editorial illustration. It is not archival or documentary imagery of Zzyzx.

    On the drive through California’s Mojave Desert, a road sign can seem to be playing a private joke: ZZYZX. It looks like someone tried to win a contest for the last possible word in the dictionary. But the sign points to a real place—an oasis on the edge of Soda Dry Lake, west of Baker—and its odd name sits on top of a much older landscape.

    Before the name, there was water

    The National Park Service describes Soda Springs as a natural spring system that the Mohave and Chemehuevi people used for many generations. It was also used by early western explorers and the U.S. Army by the mid-1800s. The wider basin tells an equally improbable story: when the climate was cooler and wetter, Lake Mojave covered this area; as conditions changed, salt flats remained while water persisted at the springs.

    That is the useful way to approach Zzyzx: not as a desert punch line, but as a name attached to a real, long-lived water source. The place’s layers—Indigenous use, travel routes, commercial ambition, and research—do not all belong to the same era or carry the same meaning.

    Editorial illustration of groundwater feeding a small desert oasis beside a salt flat.
    Editorial illustration of the springs-and-salt-flat setting; it is a conceptual image, not a geological survey.

    A resort with an alphabet-ending name

    In 1944, Curtis Springer began operating the Zzyzx Mineral Springs and Health Resort on mining-claim land, according to the National Park Service. The operation was a full desert spectacle: a castle-like building, dining hall, library, pool house, goat farm, rabbit rooms, radio advertising, and mail-order health products. The name proved memorable; the setting made the pitch feel even stranger.

    That history needs a little caution around the edges. Springer called himself a doctor despite leaving school after ninth grade, the Park Service says. By the late 1960s, complaints were increasing, and the site was far from medical care when genuinely ill visitors arrived. The account also notes accusations involving false advertising and tax evasion, along with a Bureau of Land Management challenge to his claims. The colorful resort story is documented; it is not a reason to repeat its health claims.

    Editorial illustration of a stylized mid-century desert mineral-springs pavilion beside a salt flat.
    Editorial illustration inspired by the idea of a mid-century desert resort, not a reconstruction of a historic building.

    What Zzyzx is now

    California State University took over the facility in 1976. Today the CSU Desert Studies Center describes itself as a 1,280-acre field station on the western edge of Mojave National Preserve, with access to salt flats, creosote lowlands, Joshua tree forests, rocky slopes, lava flows, and dunes. It supports courses and research; it is not simply a deserted roadside ruin.

    That distinction matters to visitors. The National Park Service says people may visit Lake Tuendae and the picnic area, while the buildings across the lake are private, active educational property. The Center likewise says its facilities are closed without a reservation. The best version of a Zzyzx stop is therefore a short, curious look at the public landscape—not an invitation to explore closed buildings.

    Why the word sticks

    Zzyzx earns its reputation because the name is visually absurd, but the story lasts because the place is not. A spring in a salt basin made travel, settlement, commerce, and study possible in different moments. The sign may be the hook; Soda Springs is the reason there is anything to point to.

    Sources

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