Eichbaum Toll Road

Eichbaum had failed at Rhyolite and made his money instead running sightseeing trips at Venice and on Catalina, which he sold to pay for this. His first plan was two toll roads; borax company men killed the southern one, and Inyo County took six months to approve what was left. Crews graded some thirty-five miles over Towne Pass to a camp of twenty tent bungalows he called Bungalette City. The monument that followed treated the valley as vacant ground: it put the Timbisha Shoshone homeland under federal management and ended their stewardship of it.

What the plaque says

In 1926 H.W. Eichbaum obtained a franchise for a toll road from Darwin Falls to Stovepipe Wells, the first maintained road into the valley from the west. It changed the area from mining to tourism and brought about the creation of Death Valley National Monument seven years later.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes — 1.8 mi
  Fourteen square miles of dunes near Stovepipe Wells, and the easiest sand in the park to reach.
• Furnace Creek — 20 mi
  The valley hub, the hottest air temperature ever officially recorded, and the Timbisha village that was here first.
• Zabriskie Point — 23 mi
  Gullied gold badlands eroded out of an ancient lakebed, best at first light.
• Racetrack Playa — 24 mi
  A dead-flat lakebed where rocks leave trails behind them, twenty-seven miles down a tire-shredding road.

More markers nearby

• Burned Wagons Point — steps away
• Old Stovepipe Wells — 5.3 mi
• Old Harmony Borax Works — 18 mi
• Death Valley Gateway — 20 mi