Plan on going to California any time soon? Why not take a side trip to Slab City, an infamous ‘hippie’ community of transients, snow birds from Canada and other places with harsh winters, introverts, and other societal rejects. Ever since I learned about the place, I have been rather intrigued by it. I’ve always wanted to live within a commune, and that is part of the reason I’m so curious about Slab City. I would probably try to live there one winter, but not year round – I can’t take temperatures over 90 degrees, which is why I stay inside on summer days reveling in the air conditioning – and not without a man by my side.

There is crime in the Slabs – another name for the community – and addiction is rampant. If you are a cynophobe I don’t recommend visiting the place, because canines run rampant and there have been reports of dog bites there. People pretty much live how they please, though I must wonder how the hell do they keep clean? (Hygiene is one reason I could never be homeless. I need a daily shower!)

Welcome to Slab City, widely known as “the last free place in America.”

The entrance is marked by a small hill caked with eccentric acrylic paint, promising love and preaching faith, all in bright pink letters. This is known as Salvation Mountain. Meth has long been a choice drug in these parts.

Slab city is completely uncontrolled and isolated from government concern. All parking is free and unregulated. Yet—despite the drugs, freedom, isolation and heavy south-California sun—the residents reject seniority and avoid shrewdness, remaining polite and open-armed to new comers. Hippies, free-spirits, druggies, eccentrics and adventurers—people have been living for free in Slab City since the late ’40s.

Slab City is also home to a number of hot springs, with temperatures ranging between 43°C (110°F) and 46°C (115°F). Though the water admittedly looks like a muddy cesspool, “hobo-baths” are a right of passage in the Slab City community.

The name Slab City was derived from the concrete slabs that lay across the desert—remains from an abandoned World War II site. It’s amazing to think that an old war site has become one of the most peace-loving and free communities in the U.S. Not just any kind of person could make due with a society devoid of electricity, running water and proper washrooms, but for the Slabbers, these conveniences are a small price to pay for your freedom. – Ted Barnaby/The Plaid Zebra

I commend the snowbirds who travel to the Slabs every winter but I hope they carry some type of protection. They have a lot of guts. Personally, I would probably not last a week in this community yet I still have the desire to experience it. I’m not sure how my fiance would take it, but his dogs would love it – my cats would not, however. Well, maybe the adult male as the female is still a kitten.

“They call it the Third Reich, Hell’s Kitchen. Gets hot as a motherf*****. But there’s music everyday. Soothes my soul.” Stix… (“the dot-dot-dot’s the most important part”), a Slab City resident, is talking to Kristin Gogol, a 23-year-old middle school science teacher from Washington DC. Around them, solar-powered lights flicker on and off, entwined around a dead branch jammed into baked pond ground and adorned with plastic dolls missing various eyes and limbs. An intricately crafted mobile made of cut-up beer cans twirls lazily. Dogs howl in the thick hot night, and someone is pumping out rave music across the stifling air. Kristin had never heard of Slab City before she stumbled across a cheap Airbnb listing for an RV in the Sonoran Desert while planning a 10-day road trip around California. Near Salvation Mountain – a huge art installation made of adobe, straw, mud and lead-free paint, which has long drawn movie crews, photographers and bands from afar – are the concrete remains of Camp Dunlap, a WWII military barracks.

Residents of Slab City – a transient community of artists, retirees, the desperately poor, snowbirds, criminals, anarchists and grifters – have been squatting amongst the abandoned concrete slabs since the 1950s. Numbers can swell to around 4,000 in the winter when the temperature drops, but for my visit this summer, it’s 120 degrees and there are only 150 or so residents left – plus two Airbnb digs, still open for people like Kristin, who admits she didn’t expect the unbearable temperatures of summer in the California desert.

You don’t live in Slab City because the rest of the world welcomes you, and perhaps this is its charm for the reams of tourists who drive all the way in, past the Salton Sea to take pictures at Salvation Mountain, check out the artwork at East Jesus, slink past West Satan (another area amongst the slabs), and, now, book a night in what Slab City residents call “the last free place in America”, in order to hang out with people who found society offered them nothing, so they built their own society instead. – Ruth Fowler/The Independent