“I decide the priorities around here,
and those are to be a real community.”
Gerald Freeman, Owner of Nipton, California
When I lived in Arizona, I had a patch of Gaillardia in my flower garden. With a little bit of water and a whole lot of sun, the Gaillardia grew like a weed. There’s a town in the eastern California desert that’s like that: with very little water but a whole lot of sun, it’s grown sixty-fold since the 1980s, and half of that growth has been in the last six months.
The town is Nipton, California, and truth be told, the population was 1 in 1984 when geologist Gerald Freeman bought the outpost. Mr. Freeman went to work capitalizing on the town’s most abundant resource—sunshine—and installed 80 solar panels, which generate enough electricity to satisfy most of the small town’s power needs. Mr. Freeman then built “eco-cabins” to woo visitors heading into the nearby Mojave National Preserve, and he renovated an adobe hotel built circa 1904-1910 and reopened it as a bed and breakfast.
In addition to Mr. Freeman’s hard work, some fortuitous developments in the area have attracted eco-minded workers to Nipton. In the nearby hills a rare earth mine is expanding, digging up minerals to be used in wind turbines and smart phones, and a solar farm is going in not 15 minutes away. All of this accounts for Nipton’s population spike and current head count of 60.
Okay, so maybe you can’t say Nipton has been growing like a weed, not yet. But with Mr. Freeman’s vision and hard work, and the recent surge in green jobs in the area, the little town is blooming, if not booming.
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