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From wild horses to atomic remnants, my journey across the desert just getting to Tybo had already been unexpectedly eventful. The day wasn't done with me yet. The road to get to Tybo is pretty tame as far as ghost town trails go. I had turned off highway 6, past the weathered air force base camp and airstrip used for the Project Faultless nuclear test, among other covert purposes. The area around Tybo is dry, with dust and dim sagebrush as my only companions for the first fe

When you're rolling across the wide open desert of central Nevada in early January, alone doesn't begin to describe the feeling. It's all cracking fence posts and rusty barbed wire. The few man-made sites you do pass are all marked keep out, no trespassing, or Property of the United States Govt. My day had begun hours earlier camping near some hot springs miles outside of Mammoth Lakes, California. I had stayed there for a few days after repeated storms blanketed the area wit

Paradox is a place that seemed to invite those estranged from society. The West is wide open, and many who crossed it in the 19th century were leaving society behind, at least temporarily. But to be estranged from it is altogether different. Some of the people who came to the Paradox Valley had no place among civilized men and no use for their laws either. One of those men was Axel Peterson. In 1910 he arrived in Paradox, a hard-drinking drifter in his mid-thirties. He looked