The Circus That Bought An Old West Town In The Desert

From 10 miles out, the tiny town of Nipton suddenly appears in the middle distance like a mirage: a huddle of lush eucalyptus trees in an otherwise impossibly vast, barren expanse of the California desert.

From closer up, the place still feels dream-like. Old west-style buildings, including the Nipton Trading Post and a five-bed hotel built in the early 1900s, dot the community but are shuttered to the public. Other than the freight trains that regularly slice through the edge of town, Nipton is often completely silent. The unincorporated area is home to only about a dozen people, depending on the season, and spans just 80 acres. (“Blink and you’ll miss it,” one of the town’s caretakers says.)

But recently, a rotating cast of unlikely characters has started showing up in this seemingly forgotten desert outpost. There were the six acrobats from Ukraine (and one from Russia), who came to practice death-defying stunts in matching uniforms. Then a posse of clowns arrived, staying for two weeks and taking over the historic hotel. A pair of contortionists followed, riding unicycles around in leather jackets and twisting their bodies into inhuman shapes.

All of those performers came with the circus.

Spiegelworld, an entertainment and circus company based in Las Vegas, bought the entire town in 2022 for $2.5m. This isolated plot of land, roughly an hour’s drive from Vegas and the same distance from the nearest grocery store, is now known as Spiegelworld’s “global headquarters” or, more simply, the “circus town”.

“I was totally bewitched by the whole thing,” Ross Mollison, Spiegelworld’s founder, said of his first visit to Nipton. “It was just gorgeous.”

Mollison, whose preferred job title is “impresario extraordinaire” (an old-school show business term that underscores he’s “the guy behind it all”, he says), had characteristically grand plans for his new town. And in the nearly three years since its sale, Nipton has slowly started to transform into the circus haven of Mollison’s dreams. Nipton now functions as both a retreat and a rehearsal space for Spiegelworld circus performers, who filter into the remote town on a regular basis to come up with new acts for Spiegelworld shows in Vegas – and to simply escape from the stage for a few days.

In other words, Mollison says: “We’re creating our own little Disneyland.”

‘Summer camp to make a show’

Over the past century, Nipton has been forced to shape-shift many times to survive.

The town first materialized just after the turn of the 20th century. Then called Nippeno Camp, it served as both a whistle stop on the railroad between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles and as a gold mining camp for prospectors trying their luck in the surrounding “golden triangle” mining district. Clara Bow, a celebrated silent film actor, was a frequent guest at the sole Nipton hotel in the 1920s (the room where Bow stayed is still marked with a golden plaque).

“It is, of course, unnecessary to state that Nippeno is the future metropolis of California,” the now defunct Salt Lake Herald newspaper wrote confidently in 1905.

But towards the middle of the century, Nipton languished, hovering on the brink of extinction. In more recent years, the town has changed hands several times; a marijuana company bought Nipton in 2017 with plans to turn it into a cannabis-themed tourist destination. Elsewhere in southern California, other small communities have sometimes been bought up by corporate interests, including the ghost town of Eagle Mountain near Joshua Tree and a tiny settlement called Desert Center.

When Mollison finally showed up in Nipton a few years ago, the place felt almost deserted. There was trash heaped everywhere, and the town’s historic buildings were in disrepair. “This place is a dump,” Mollison remembers thinking upon first setting foot there. But he was also thinking about his circus, and the lack of community spaces in modern American life.

“With the diminution of religion for many people, there’s nowhere where we go to sing together any more,” he said. “[But] the circus is a real community. We have brought families, or individuals in some cases, to Vegas 15 years ago, who have been there the whole time and have now bought homes and had kids, and their kids are coming and working in the circus.”

Many members of that circus community have since ventured out to Nipton, including Max Baumgarten, who describes himself as a comedic actor with “a speciality within the world of clown”.

Mollison initially reached out to Baumgarten in the spring of 2023 with an unusual question: will you come up with a comedic performance based on Formula One racing? The show was to be completely created and rehearsed in Nipton over the span of two weeks, then performed in the town’s trading post for a select audience, and finally showcased for one night only in Spiegelworld’s restaurant and bar Superfrico within Vegas’s Cosmopolitan hotel.

Baumgarten quickly assembled a team of his “closest clown performer friends” and the group trekked out to the desert.

“It was kind of like summer camp to make a show,” Baumgarten said.

Each night, the performers bunked together in Nipton’s hotel, and each day they jumped between the town’s different buildings to rehearse their new show. An old schoolhouse built in the 1930s, an unassuming one-room space with a tin roof, was their favorite place to practice; the weathered wooden floor and high ceilings made the building feel like an upscale dance studio – just in the middle of nowhere.

As for Formula One-themed props, the group rolled in real tires, brought in boxes of steering wheels and helmets, and built entire sets out of cardboard. Their costumes were inexpensive race car drivers’ outfits from Amazon. For the group’s two performances in Nipton, their invited guests included other circus performers, who drove out from Vegas, and also a handful of local miners, who work in the nearby rare earth mines and some of whom live on the Nipton property in RVs.

“Being away from all the distractions, and having that be your only job, with people who are that skilled – you can make so much,” Baumgarten said.

Plumbing issues, trash and ‘magic’

But in between the clown shows and the acrobatics and the general glitz and glam that has drifted in from Vegas, Nipton has no shortage of mundane, real-world problems to contend with.

Alex and Frank Strebel, a couple from Colorado who now mostly live in Nipton, were hired by Spiegelworld to deal with those issues. On one recent October afternoon, their most pressing matter was the town’s 70-year-old plumbing system, which had suddenly sprung a leak.

“We’ve got water – oh no, turn it off, turn it off,” Frank cautioned in a phone call to Alex that afternoon, who was stationed on the other side of the property, as a small geyser of water shot out from a broken pipe. “Guess what: the pipe has a crack in it. It’s fractured.”

Alex and Frank have gotten used to patching problems like this one. Before Nipton, the duo were “artists full-time and handymen by necessity”, Alex says, and worked for Spiegelworld in an informal capacity by crafting the occasional prop or circus costume. But now the latter part of their job description has taken center stage. Over the past few years, they’ve removed roughly 350 tons of trash from the property (including old mattresses, toilets and an abandoned boat); fixed the area’s electrical issues; and transformed a sludgy hole in the ground into a pristine pond with a little dock.

The ultimate goal has been to turn “magical” Nipton, as signs for the town promise, into an oasis for both Spiegelworld performers and the seasonal miners and other locals who have lived there for longer. Because the town has no local government, if non-Spiegelworld residents have any issues, they typically take them up with Alex and Frank. And while some people have kept to themselves since the circus came to town, others have wanted a front-row seat to the spectacle. One retired long-haul trucker, who often introduces himself as the unofficial “mayor” of Nipton, stops by frequently to help the couple with their renovation work, they said.

“[Desert people] are extremely hard workers, because living out in the middle of nowhere is always hard work,” Alex said, sitting in Nipton’s shuttered cafe and saloon after troubleshooting that day’s plumbing issues. “And then most circus people, especially if they grew up in the circus, they know everything – they know how to repair the tents and set them up and fix the costumes.”

“So hard work is no stranger to either party,” Frank added.

With Frank and Alex’s help, the next major phase of work in Nipton will involve revamping the hotel and a cluster of metallic, mid-century trailers that line the town. Spiegelworld aims to open some of those accommodations to the public in late 2025. In total, the company said it plans to invest at least $20m into Nipton.

Once a gold rush town and then merely a neglected, dusty exit off the freeway, Nipton has since been reborn as “the heart and soul” of the circus, Mollison said. Still, years after buying it, he feels no great pressure to define what, exactly, his “circus town” might look like in a decade – or another century – from now.

“Especially when your life is putting on shows or running restaurants,” he said, “it’s nice to just disappear out to the desert.”