Garlock: The Ghost Town That Named a Fault

Off to your east, past the Rand Mountains on the road that still carries the name, lie the bleached ruins of Garlock. Long before any mill, this was a reliable spring the freighters called Cow Wells, also known as El Paso City. By about 1880 it was a way station and stage stop where teamsters watered stock rather than risk the treacherous washes of Red Rock Canyon to the north.

Gold changed everything. An arrastra was grinding ore here by 1887, and in 1893 a nugget reportedly worth $1,900 came down from Goler Heights, touching off a rush. When rich gold was struck at Rand Mountain in 1895, the new camp of Randsburg had ore but little water. Garlock had water. In 1894–95 Eugene Garlock of Tehachapi hauled in an eight-stamp mill to crush Randsburg's Yellow Aster ore, and the place that miners called "the Garlock mill," then simply "Garlock," was born.

By 1899 several hundred people lived here, with a school, a church, saloons, and even a Garlock Literary Society; a post office ran from 1896 to 1904. The boom was brief. In 1898 a pipeline carried Garlock's water uphill to Randsburg, and the Kramer–Randsburg railroad let ore bypass the town for larger mills. The crowd drifted away; only a faint 1920s revival followed.

Garlock's largest legacy is underfoot. The Garlock Fault, one of California's longest, takes its name from this spot. It is a rare left-lateral fault that helps mark the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada. Quiet for roughly 500 years, it crept measurably for the first time in the modern record after the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes, just to the north.