Amargosa Opera House

In March 1967 a New York dancer named Marta Becket stopped in Death Valley Junction to have a flat tire fixed. While she waited she wandered over to Corkill Hall, the old company social hall, and looked through a hole in the back door at a wrecked room with a caved stage and flood-stained walls. She rented it for forty-five dollars a month on the condition that she handle the repairs, moved out from New York with her husband, and gave her first performance on February 10, 1968.

Audiences were not the point, which was fortunate, because on many nights there were none. So she painted one. Over the following years she covered the walls and ceiling with a sixteenth-century crowd, kings and nuns and gamblers and gypsies and musicians in the alcoves, an audience that never failed to show. Then she danced for them. National Geographic found her, and then everyone did. Her last performance was on February 12, 2012; she died here on January 30, 2017, at ninety-two.

The town is now owned by the nonprofit she created, and it is a strange and worthwhile stop: the opera house with its murals intact, the adjoining hotel with more of them in the rooms and the dining room, tours daily, performances now and then. The adobe is fragile and storm damage has been serious in recent years, so check ahead before you drive out. There is no fuel in town.