Inglourious Hikers: Visiting the Abandoned, Off-Limits Nazi Compound in L.A.
Tucked away like a repressed memory is one of Los Angeles’s strangest historical sites, inside one of its richest communities. Situated off the Rustic Canyon trail in Topanga State Park, it mixes hiking with World War II-era Nazi history.
By the way, it’s also illegal to enter parts of the abandoned Nazi compound at Murphy Ranch, though this doesn’t stop many visitors, from ordinary hikers to graffiti artists. It also didn’t stop me, although the city is cracking down on people who enter the remaining structures and is planning to demolish or seal off the 80-year-old compound for good (Watch the video clip of my visit.).
I’m surprised that no Hollywood director ever made a movie about the ranch, which is located 5 miles away from the Pacific Ocean next to the luxurious houses of Pacific Palisades. The place has more than enough back story: In the 1930s, a mysterious German advised a rich heiress to spend $4 million on a survivalist home for Nazis because a Third Reich victory and American anarchy were believed inevitable. Let’s see director Quentin Tarantino make up a story like that.
Just a day at the park with some old Nazi ruins (All photos: Greg Keraghosian/Yahoo Travel)
That German national was known only as Herr Schmidt, and the Nazi sympathizers who bought the land in 1933 were Winona and Norman Stephens. In 1941, after the first shots of Pearl Harbor had been fired, the American government apparently shut down the complex, which for all its grand planning was far from being completed. (According to a more detailed history, the compound experienced a second life as an artist-colony home.)
Murphy Ranch is something of an open secret in Los Angeles; it’s been blogged about for years by hiking enthusiasts, and it’s even got its own Yelp page. When a friend told me last month about the ruins and the site’s shady past, I was compelled to see it for myself.
The compound’s 80-year-old power station, which people often explore despite the fence around it
The articles I’d read about the 4-mile, roundtrip hike mentioned nothing about fences being raised around parts of the compound, but recent blog commenters had reported this, and some (though not all) said they had been ticketed by park rangers for trespassing.
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I didn’t know what I’d experience, but I persuaded two brave friends to find out with me during the week of Christmas. We did find fences around the two remaining walled structures — the former power station and the garage — both of which had large holes cut through them. We went inside, as did the other tourists, graffiti artists, and goth photo enthusiasts who were around that day. None of us got in trouble, and I didn’t feel like we were doing anything illegal, though there was a barely noticeable “do not enter” sign covered in graffiti.
Inside the power station, where graffiti artists were hard at work
It turns out we were all lucky. When I called city and park officials afterward, they were serious about citing anyone who enters the structures. It just so happens that rangers weren’t patrolling while we were there.
“The fenced-off area is off-limits,” Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Superintendent Charles Singer told Yahoo Travel. “The department is planning to clean that up, and we’re trying to secure funding to do that. Some of the area is open for hiking and viewing. All the graffiti is illegal.”
The officials I asked didn’t have a target date for when the structures would be more robustly sealed off to the public, but once the city raises the money, it’s happening. So if you want to risk a fine and a court date to explore this stranger-than-fiction compound, now’s the time for a field trip. There are valid safety reasons for keeping people away, but I’m grateful I got to see it while I could.
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The steel ruins of the Nazi garage
Without sounding like Indiana Jones, I’ll describe my forbidden afternoon hike here.
You’ll drive to a quiet neighborhood with very expensive-looking houses — the exact intersection is Capri Drive and Casale Road. Nearby, you’ll find the trailhead and hike 2 miles down Sullivan Ridge Fire Road, admiring a pretty ocean view to your left.
The ocean view near the trailhead
You can take one of two concrete staircases from the trail to the ranch — the second one, through a chainlink fence, includes more than 500 stairs, which you’re likely to feel on the way back up. But we bypassed these and hiked to a third entry point: the black iron gate, with a hole in the stone wall to its left. Surrounded by nature, the gate and driveway look comically out of place now, but we could picture Herr Schmidt envisioning a convoy of Mercedes-Benzes going in and out of there.
The black gate to nowhere
Soon after the gate, you’ll pass a large, empty water tank. From there, you’ll take a dilapidated, paved road lined with sycamore trees, which forks two ways (You’ll want to stay left.).
After about a quarter mile, you’ll descend some steep stairs and reach the raised garden bed. This was meant to be a greenhouse where residents could grow their own food. Now, it just grows weeds.
The raised garden
Walk down some more stairs, and you’ll see the compound’s most preserved structure, the double-generator power station. This is one of the two restricted areas, though it didn’t look so restricted inside. Visitors were passing in and out of the fence, with several graffiti artists casually spray-painting over the works that preceded them. There’s a ladder you can climb to a catwalk, which remains sturdy after all these years, although you’d be risking about a 20-foot fall.
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Even with the foot traffic, the station felt spooky. There’s also a certain poetic justice in seeing a potential base of world domination reduced to a playground for taggers and teenagers.
The compound is like an ever-changing graffiti museum.
The other fenced-off area that’s easy to walk into is the garage, which is larger and in much poorer shape. Here you’ll find collapsed steel, abandoned bathtubs and kitchen appliances, and stairs that lead nowhere.
As fun — and eerie — as all this was to see firsthand, I can understand why the city would block passage to this place. No one is maintaining the site, and there’s always the chance that a roof collapse or a falling ladder could seriously injure someone. While the hiking trail itself is quite safe, you’ll be entering the abandoned structures at your own risk.
The stairs behind the garage
There are a number of quirky artifacts on display near the power station and garage: a furnace that’s randomly sitting in the grass, a ghost scarecrow made of sheets keeping watch over the ranch, and an overturned Volkswagen van resting on its side.
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A VW van possibly leftover from the artist colony that lived here in the ’60s and ’70s.
Also, the Mona Lisa of the graffiti art in the ranch had to be the Walter White-as-Heisenberg mural spray-painted over a tall tank.
A fitting image, considering we were breaking bad just to explore this place.
We climbed the steep stairs back up the way we came and out of the gate, then headed down the trail toward our starting point. But our sightseeing wasn’t done: I descended the first flight of concrete stairs that we’d passed for a peek at a large, abandoned tank, which you can crawl inside if you dare.
A view from the tank’s opening
On your way back to your car, there’s one more feature you can explore that has nothing to do with Nazis and possibly a lot to do with drunken driving. Down a slope maybe a quarter mile from the trailhead is the wreckage of a truck that’s embedded in the dirt. Crawling your way down the slope for a closer look isn’t the wisest thing to do, but wisdom was not what got me this far, so I did it anyway.
The Nazi sympathizers’ botched getaway truck? Probably not.
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