Out of Death Valley

On the way out of Death Valley, I was forced by several areas of washed out roads to backtrack on US190 and then north on US267. There were some deaths of people caught in a flash flood a few days before. And the road was badly damaged in some areas. One of the park rangers was telling me he had to drive 300 miles per day to get to work and home again.

The backtracking gave me the opportunity to revisit Scotty’s Castle. I had been there back in the mid ’70s.

The front gate. Scotty was a ‘cowboy, gold miner, etc.’ who was able, though guile and personality to endear himself to the real owner of the castle, who met Scotty when he invested in one of his gold mining adventures. Although Scotty had never found any gold, they became friends and Scotty lived on the grounds. Many reporters of the day were convinced that Scotty had made a fortune from gold mining and owned the castle. He told them that the mine shaft started under his bed. The real owner made his fortune in the insurance business. He built the castle as a get away. Cost $2.5 million in the ’20s-’30s.

The pool here below left was never finished so it’s never had water in it…all the fancy tiles for the bottom are in the underground passageways. They’re there behind those windows in the pool. There is like a 1/4 mile of passageways. I took both the above ground tour of the house and below ground tour.

The neat thing about the place is that nearly everything that the owners had stayed with the castle. Even their clothes are hanging from the clothes hangers. All the furniture is original, same with the curtains and carpets. The place is huge and quite impressive.

This is the courtyard of the house….the gal there in the ’30s style dress is the tour guide.

This is the main room, Scotty had a room right off of this hall but his dog didn’t like to sleep there so he never would either. The owner later built Scotty a small house on the grounds.

The whole place is kept quite dark to prevent sun damage so I didn’t get to many pics of the small living spaces, and because of the crowd (around 20 people).