People call Debra Dawson a crazy cat lady. Dawson lives in a ghost town in New Mexico with her kittens. The 65-year-old woman is the only resident who lives among the town’s (named Yeso) crumbling structures. Yeso was long deserted before Dawson moved in with her husband, as Outside detailed:
She is one of just a handful of people known to permanently live in the ruins of the many ghost towns sprinkled across the West’s high plains.
“Hard to imagine 300 families here,” Dawson says, walking through one of Yeso’s collapsing adobe neighborhoods, shadowed by her dogs, Duchess and Missy. Dawson has bright blue eyes and shoulder-length blond hair that she wears tied back. She is sporting an Army green jacket that conceals a well-used Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon hoodie. It’s an unseasonably cold day in October, and a fog has settled on the landscape, coating the mesquite, sagebrush cacti, and grasses in dew. As the weather grows colder, the air freezes, leaving the plants covered in tiny icicles that reflect the afternoon sun and vibrate in the steady wind. “If it’s windy anywhere in New Mexico, it’s windy here,” says Dawson. “But it sure is pretty.”
image via Outside