A Relic in Its Own Right
From condemned to centennial, 1979–2026
The Park Service bought a settlement, not a hotel. The editor of Desert Magazine, a year late and in a sour mood, wrote in 1980 that the government had “just recently took over the entire community of Stove Pipe Wells.” Fred Harvey, Inc., which became Amfac Hotels and Resorts, ran it as managing concessioner from the autumn of 1979. The Service’s 1980 plan imagined a public-use area with a contact station, a staff housing area with a recreation center and a fenced utility yard. What got done was more modest: renovation to fire and safety codes, and tan board-and-batten siding with blue trim on most of the buildings, which is the look the Village still wears.
Edwin Rothfuss, who arrived as superintendent in August 1982, said years later that the place “looked like it needed to be condemned,” with staff housing in sorry shape and maintenance “impossibly deficient.” He had found an old report by a safety engineer that recommended burning the buildings and planting the site with cactus, and he used it to make Death Valley the Service’s top priority for concession rehabilitation; more than $5 million was spent. The report almost certainly dates from the years before the purchase, and describes the condition the government bought. A visiting writer in 1988 still called the Village “a throwback to the 1930s,” with rooms at $45 to $60 against $65 to $100 at Furnace Creek Ranch, and meant it kindly.
The encampment went on as it had. In 1981 Desert Magazine printed the burro race rules as they stood under the concession: grown men pull grown burros toward a center post, unload, light a fire, grease a griddle, and the first man “able to induce a flapjack into a burro’s mouth is declared the winner.” Big Jim Smith of Barstow, who had retired after his third win in 1974, came back and won in 1980. In 1984 the Village hosted the hikers, three breakfasts, the Desert Trek, a Sunday barbecue, the race and a “Stovepipe Wells Philharmonic,” and the speaker at the historical breakfast was Ray Chesson, “who came to Bennett’s Well to die but became summer caretaker at Stovepipe Wells instead.”
In 1994 the California Desert Protection Act made the monument Death Valley National Park. In 2002 Amfac became Xanterra. In 2004 a rectangular pool replaced Peg Putnam’s wedge-shaped one. In January 2011 the concession passed to the Ortega family’s Death Valley Lodging Company, and on January 13, 2024, to Destination Death Valley, LLC, under a ten-year contract. The operator changes; the shape does not. Stovepipe Wells is still a hotel, a store, a saloon, a gas station and a campground on the fan below Mosaic Canyon, where the lumber trucks stuck in January 1926, and the way in from the west is still Highway 190 over Towne Pass, which is the road Bob Eichbaum built when the county would not.
On November 11, 2026, the resort turns one hundred. Nobody who worked on the road or dumped the lumber is left to ask, and most of the people who told its story first were selling something. This history has tried to go back to what the newspapers and records said at the time, and to say plainly where the record runs out. If you have a piece of it, a photograph, a menu, a story your grandmother told, we would like to see it.
Sources
Reno Evening Gazette, Feb 7, 1979; Mono Herald, Oct 11, 1979; Desert Magazine, Feb 1980, Feb 1981, Nov 1981 and Nov 1984; NPS Stovepipe Wells Developed Area Plan (1980); Hal Rothman, To Ride Alone (2004), and Rothfuss interview (2002); Anchorage Daily News, Nov 20, 1988; California Desert Protection Act (1994); NRHP nomination, Stovepipe Wells Hotel (2012); National Parks Traveler, Jan 8, 2011; NPS concession award, Mar 7, 2023, and press release, May 21, 2025.
