Click on the Amargosa Opera House Death Valley Junction image to enlarge

Amargosa Opera House Death Valley Junction

Amargosa Opera House Death Valley Junction was a place I learned of when I visited my Great Aunt Margaret as a child.

My Great Aunt Margaret was always an interesting person to visit.

Margaret was my moms only living Aunt.  She lived in Santa Cruz, California by herself.  She was a rebel in her family and had moved from the family hometown of Huntington, Pennsylvania all the way out to Santa Cruz.  She had a child out of wedlock, quite a controversy for an Irish Catholic woman back in those days.  But she had raised her son and she was now a grandparent as well.

What was interesting about visiting Aunt Margaret was she always had a pile of National Geographic magazines sitting around waiting to be read.  Reading those magazines on visits to her house introduced me to Geography, Travel and Photography.  I couldn’t imagine a more fun thing to do than to travel around learning about new places and taking pictures of those places.

In one of those articles was a story about Marta Becket and the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction.  The article was about Death Valley and a stop to watch her do a performance with no audience in the house.

For me as a child Death Valley Junction seemed like it was a million miles away, and it was a place I had to go to someday.

Marta Becket rented the recreation hall in 1967, then known as Corkhill Hall, began repairs, created the sets, painted murals on the adobe walls and renamed it the Amargosa Opera House.  Death Valley Junction consists of the Opera House, a cafe and a motel.  There are no gas stations.

The building was originally built by the Pacific Borax Company in 1924.  It was the social center for Death Valley Junction from 1924 to 1948.  From 1948 till 1967 it was abandoned when Becket transformed it into the Amargosa Opera House.

It took me awhile to get there.  40 years from the time I was sitting on my Aunt Margaret’s couch reading National Geographics till driving through the desert as an adult in my Subaru Forester.

But I finally got to see and photograph the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction.