Failing the Grasp the Magnitude of Death Valley Scotty's Grotto

By Cole Coonce
1/7/05

It’s winter, I hate the holidays, and there is no drag racing between Pomona and Pomona. It has been raining in Los Angeles like Dante’s shower spigot and I am cold, wet and bored. Bored. I have been climbing the walls with cabin fever.

A couple of days after Xmas, my pal BZ called from Palm Springs. He was in SoCal for a few days, having flown in from Ithaca, New York to see his relatives ignore each other and spend the holiday at the local Injun’ casino. He too had had enough. He craved heat and a chance to warm his withered bones. He wanted to go out to Death Valley again.

More specifically, BZ wanted to meet at the Royal Hawaiian Motel in Baker, spend the night, wake up and have a strawberry malted at the Bun Boy and then hike into something called "Scotty's Canyon," somewhere between Tecopa Hot Springs and Stovepipe Wells.

Baker is nothing but a petrol pump and a thermometer, the last gas(p) between Barstow and Vegas.

“Have you been following the weather?” I asked him. The rains had not reached Palm Springs yet, and they were just kicking in at Tujunga. The forecast called for the mother of all turdfloaters. I begged off for a few days. He agreed and he drove to LA. We found a 24 window where it wasn't raining and it was Scotty's Canyon or bust. We left my house at 10:30 pm Wednesday. We were back in LA twenty four hours later.

BZ had a well-worn copy of a book on Death Valley penned by a French geologist poet-type who wrote that the grottos and mosaics in Scotty's Canyon (named after Death Valley Scotty) must be seen to be believed. The book says this is one of the last untouched places on the planet, and even though The Frog provides specific directions to these still unspoiled wonders, he writes in his book that these directions will do no harm to the landscape as he says no flatlander is ever gonna get out of his SUV, much less climb up these canyons and fuck it up by leaving PowerBar wrappers lying around.

So, with The Frog’s book in the car pocket, BZ and I motored onto hell’s half-acre, to a forgotten canyon where many years back Death Valley Scotty staked a bogus gold claim and scammed a few stockholders and investors.

It seems these rubes demanded proof of the claim. Scotty discouraged them from seeing the mine, as the terrain was too treacherous, he said. They insisted. Since he had nothing to show them, after they saddled up on burros and trekked into the canyon and its grottos, Scotty staged an ambush by “bandits” who were “onto his claim.”

In his career as a scam artist, Scotty staged two ambushes, one of which his brother actually got shot. Ooops.

Terrific folklore, I say... but almost a century later it is still a grueling hike. As I write this, I still missing three layers of skin on my heel...

At the Crowbar Café in Shoshone, I ask a tea-drinking, pistol-packing Federal Park Ranger about the conditions of the roads into Scotty’s Canyon. He says he has never heard of Scotty’s Canyon and did I mean Scotty’s Castle? Flustered, I show him the passages in the Frog’s book about the groovy grottos where Scotty staked his Potemkin village of a mining claim and staged an ambush. The Ranger said the well-paved two lane roads between Shoshone and our destination were closed because of rocks on the road... He suggested that we go to Beatty, Nevada and play blackjack or something. We headed north, but BZ was incredulous. BZ subsequently drove around the "ROADS CLOSED" barricade in his rent-a-car... it was the most stridently libertarian stunt I have ever seen him pull and it made me proud...

We drove forty miles on shutdown federal roads that were deemed “unsafe.” They were immaculate and wide-open. “They should close these more often,’ I said to BZ. “It keeps the riff-raff out.”