Reading & riding

The same year that Lenin's Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, another shortish, balding radical was launching a social experiment of his own in a patch of desert in the Sierra Nevada foothills bordering the American states of California and Nevada. Lucien Lucius Nunn had made a fortune in mining, banking and power plants, including the electricity station at Niagara Falls, but making money was not his passion. While training engineers and managers to run his businesses, Nunn discovered his vocation was the education of young men. He set up courses that mixed labour with scholarships, and encouraged self-governance by worker-students.

In 1917, Nunn set up a college at a ranch in Deep Springs, just north of Death Valley, in order to perpetuate his ideas.

Isolation would let the university quell the "uproar and strife of material things", he later wrote. "It teaches and believes that our educational institutions too often prepare their most brilliant students to be the ill-paid hirelings of the avaricious. Deep Springs does not disregard … commercialism or the spread of creature comforts, but, recognising the overloading of the ship on one side, aims to place the small weight of its influence where it will tend to develop men of fixed purpose and character, who will dedicate themselves to the higher cause of service."

Almost a century later, the valley remains a remote wilderness of desolate beauty, scrub, sand and rock stretching towards a horizon of ice-capped peaks. It appears uninterrupted by modernity save for a paved, empty road, the 168, which squeezes between gulleys and hugs undulating hills like a roller coaster. Stop your car and the only sound is the wind.

"There are signs," read the e-mail from the student communications committee. "We're the only inhabitation in the valley."

A chipped wooden arch etched with the college's name straddles a dirt driveway, at the end of which sits a collection of single-storey buildings. They are modern but have a rough-hewn modesty. Smoke plumes from the chimneys. Nunn's dream endures - but his brainchild is on the cusp of change. After half a century of anguished debate, the single-sex college is closer than ever to accepting female students.

Deep Springs boasts 1,000 hectares but has just 26 students, the number barely growing since the first intake of 20 in 1917. They mostly come from middle-class American families, with a smattering from other continents. They hear about it through word of mouth, lobby sceptical parents to let them apply, fend off the competition (more than 10 applicants for each place) and swiftly establish a close community.