Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Shoshone, CA

Shoshone is an unincorporated census-designated place in Inyo County that serves as the southern gateway to Death Valley National Park, offering the last services before the Furnace Creek area.

The town was founded in 1910 by Ralph Jacobus 'Dad' Fairbanks, a Death Valley businessman and veteran of the Greenwater copper rush, and its name may refer to the Shoshone people.

Many of Shoshone's early buildings were hauled in from the played-out boomtown of Greenwater, and a post office opened in the town in 1915.

Shoshone was a stop on the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad until the line shut down in 1940.

Remarkably, the town remains owned by Fairbanks' descendants: his daughter Estelle married Charles Brown, a former Greenwater sheriff and future California state senator, and the Brown family continued running the town.

The 2020 census counted just 22 people in Shoshone, down from 31 in 2010 and 52 in 2000, spread across a desert CDP of roughly 29 square miles at 1,585 feet elevation.

Shoshone has its own small airstrip, a single 2,380-foot runway across the highway from town.

The Shoshone Museum, housed in a former gas station, displays local mining and Native heritage artifacts, including mammoth remains found in the nearby hills.

Just outside town, the Dublin Gulch cave dwellings - homes dug into soft rock by miners in the 1920s - were occupied intermittently into the 1970s.