“There was a murder a week here, not counting people kicked in the head or falling down a shaft,” says Mike Patterson, sliding bottles of Cerro Gordo Ghost Town Root Beer down the long bar in the restored American Hotel. Ten smelters in “Fat Hill” (as its Spanish name translates) made bars from the lead and silver blasted out of a subterranean mine complex that eventually measured 50 miles. Wedged high in a windy notch in the Inyo range, Cerro Gordo in 1871 was a thriving but unruly burg with 4800 residents, seven saloons, five hotels, two large bordellos run by madams Lola Travis and Maggie Moore, and two stagecoaches a week from San Francisco. As we expected a mileage meltdown, our gorp-stuffed gobs were thoroughly smacked when we learned that, returning 14 mpg, it gives up just 1 mpg to the Jeep’s V-6 and to our last five-cylinder H3 test vehicle. On the blacktop, the Alpha skiddoos into traffic more eagerly and holds a highway speed more effortlessly and with less engine-room moan than the Jeep. It has muscle enough to tow 6000 pounds (to the Jeep’s 3500) and stampede past 60 mph in 8.9 seconds with a manly small-block snort. Steering 2.5 tons of locked-and-loaded Hummer back the other way is breezy work, thanks to the Alpha’s robust V-8. LOWS: Pinched visibility, narrow rear doors, double-take sticker price. HIGHS: V-8 haste without a big fuel bite, Cadillac trimmings, capable in the bush. At its peak before depleting the playa and shutting down in 1936, the tramway deposited 20 tons of salt per hour on the tiny hamlet of Swansea in the adjacent Owens Valley. From a transit station once manned in the warmer seasons by a very lonely family, the 300 buckets in circulation then plunged 4900 feet to waiting rail cars. The Saline Valley lies at the north end of the military’s R-2508 Special Use Airspace Complex, a vast air-power playground spanning much of the upper Mojave Desert and reaching from the edge of space to 200 feet above dirt.Įrected by mule teams from stout red-pine timbers, the salt tramway’s towers carried cables that were strung from one precarious outcropping to the next, in some places nearly vertically, up 7400 feet to a saddle in the Inyo Mountains. Passage through the Inyo Mountains is by pedigreed off-roader only-unless you’re at the pointy end of an Air Force F-15 Eagle or Marine F/A-18 Hornet. Pinched between 10,975-foot Mount Inyo to the west and 5678-foot Ubehebe Peak in Death Valley National Park to the east, the Saline Valley is today much as it was then, accessed by just a few rough-hewn trails tracing those left behind by the Panamint Indians. So from 1911 to 1914, with typical how-the-West-was-won gusto, the Saline Valley Salt Company tackled the problem by constructing a 14-mile aerial tramway, then the longest and highest in the world, to chairlift salt out of the valley. However, mules couldn’t get the twinkling cake back to civilization profitably. And back in 1911, when salt harvesting in the Saline Valley achieved industrial scale, salt was the primary food preservative. You don’t need a Hummer or a Jeep, but everybody needs salt, about one-quarter teaspoon daily, the federal government reckons.