Dry mud tracks trace a path across the deep red and green carpets of the lobby of the Amargosa Hotel and Opera House, and down the hall, hotel manager Emilee Brown is vacuuming — again.
“Every day when I come in, I don’t know what to expect, whether it’s the plumbing or flooding or the crumbling walls,” said Brown, who has managed the Death Valley Junction, California, hotel since 2022. “But I love hearing the stories that guests bring in.” Ancient plumbing, heating and roof leaks are just some of the daily challenges that come with working in a 103-year-old adobe hotel in Death Valley’s harsh climate.
On the brick fireplace mantel, the staff has hung pink satin ballet slipper stockings beneath a framed portrait of Marta Becket, a gifted performer and the longtime proprietor of the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, whose work and legacy the dedicated staff and board members are determined to preserve.
As the story goes, in 1967, Becket and her husband, Tom, rambled into Death Valley Junction to fix a flat tire. At the time, it was basically a ghost town, with nothing open save an auto shop and a gas station.
The crossroads had long been an established trade route for the federally recognized Timbisha Shoshone Tribe, who lived year-round in the desert until they were forcibly removed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, displaced by mining expansion and the creation of Death Valley National Monument in 1933.
By the 1960s, the area was mostly deserted: The old borax mill had moved south to Boron, the Tonopah-Tidewater railroad was ripped out for wartime materials in the 1940s, and Corkhill Hall — the Spanish Colonial-style adobe hotel, workers’ camp, garage and theater — had fallen into disrepair.
The old hotel sat at the edge of the Amargosa Desert (Spanish for “bitter”) in a basin vulnerable to monsoons, which flooded the region then and continue to batter it with increasing intensity.
Becket, a seasoned touring ballerina on a brief vacation over Easter weekend, peeked through the locked doors of the old adobe theater at the end of the colonnade. She spotted a stage and fell instantly in love. A split-second decision to contact the owner and lease the complex for $1 and a handshake would transform both the ghost town and the rest of Becket’s life. Over the next five decades, she turned the abandoned theater into an opera house and revived the old hotel.
“I longed to find a place where I could dance and dance — creating a new repertoire of beauty,” she told Desert magazine in 1972.
From 1968 to 1972, Becket renovated the hotel and repainted the theater by hand. She painted the stage walls in trompe l’oeil style to mimic red velvet drapery and elaborately carved and gilded Rococo woodwork. A wraparound mural animated the theater’s adobe sides and back wall, depicting balconies filled with life-size figures from 16th-century Spain. Two of Becket’s cats — one orange, one black — are shown curled beneath painted seats, while white clouds and pink cherubs float overhead on a blue-sky ceiling. In 1968, she gave her first performance here to an audience of 12.
Renamed the Amargosa Opera House, from the time it re-opened in 1972 until 2012, Becket performed en pointe every Friday, Saturday and Monday night, rain or shine, with or without an audience. Sometimes only her cats watched. The theater existed to showcase her dancing, and her final performance was on Feb. 12, 2012. Every one of the theater’s 113 seats was full, and people stood in the aisles to watch the 84-year-old dancer in “The Sitting Down Show,” so named because she could no longer perform on her feet.
“I love hearing the stories that guests bring in.”
“The theater interior looks just the way it did when Marta painted it,” said Fred Conboy, board director of Amargosa Opera House Inc., the nonprofit Becket founded in 1974 to preserve her work and legacy. Theater lights made from old Folgers coffee cans still shine down on the stage. “Conservation of the murals is tied to the conservation of the structure,” Conboy explained.
Becket, who died in 2017, created a destination unlike anything else in Death Valley, in an area where the population has, at times, dwindled to fewer than four people.
Since her passing, the nonprofit has hosted occasional lectures and concerts. “We once had a tribal blues band — the vibrations nearly peeled the paint off the walls,” Conboy recalled. This past February, the Opera House enjoyed a sold-out Valentine’s Day and 57th anniversary event with community groups like the Desert Players, who performed a variety show inspired by Becket’s work.
Across the street from the hotel, the old stucco garage where the Beckets had their tire fixed nearly 60 years ago is still standing. Becket’s old costumes — velvet bodices with metallic braiding and soft bell-shaped skirts of layered tulle — decorate the windows of a single-room storefront and one-time art gallery adjacent to it.
But sustaining an arts complex in Death Valley isn’t easy. The 1972 Desert magazine article mentioned the area’s precarious weather, particularly the seasonal rains that threaten the century-old adobe. Since then, the problems have only worsened: At least four “1,000-year rain events” have occurred each year since 2022, and last year’s summer monsoons flooded the theater. November 2025 was the wettest in 115 years, with nearly a full year’s worth of rain falling that month alone.
And Becket’s artistic legacy is at risk: Without significant repairs, the Opera House and Hotel face closure, or worse, the buildings physically collapsing.
After the flooding in 2025, the hotel staff and board team — about five people — initiated Campaign Amargosa to raise funds for repairs and preservation. According to Conboy, the infrastructure is the top priority — plumbing, electricity and the leaky roof, which has blown off the building more than once.
Private giving and donations through Campaign Amargosa are the foundation’s secondary source of financial support; the hotel — which barely breaks even — remains the main source of operating revenue. It’s one of the only places open for lodging when Death Valley is busy, especially in spring, when the wildflowers bloom. In late fall, as the holidays approach, every room in the hotel is booked.
Los Angeles-based artist Patricia Fernández Carcedo, who has been visiting the hotel since she was a teenager, cited Becket’s project as deeply influential. One November, she brought friends to the hotel to camp and cook a Thanksgiving meal together.
“A couple of bikers came through, and they knew about Amargosa; there was this sense of magic in knowing that someone could love this strange and quiet and beautiful place as much as I did,” Carcedo said. She added, “I haven’t returned to Amargosa for a few years now, as a way of preserving my own dreams and memories of this place.
“Standing at a junction, the site of Marta’s Opera House will always be part of the desert’s very layered and complex historical landscape. It feels very important to remember Marta as an artist and visionary whose life was unpredictable in many ways.”
If ever there were a metaphor for arts funding in the United States today, especially in rural areas, this is it: a crumbling but delicately appointed adobe arts complex, slowly succumbing to the elements while a team of enthusiasts works overtime to keep it from dissolving into the landscape around it.
“Standing at a junction, the site of Marta’s Opera House will always be part of the desert’s very layered and complex historical landscape.”
Even Becket realized that preserving her dream would always be an uphill battle. “Even if it’s torn down tomorrow, no one can take away the hours of joy I spent painting it,” she said in the 2000 documentary Amargosa, eyes glimmering in the desert light. “It’s the experience that matters.”
A mural in the lobby shows the town’s eventual fate, painted presciently by Becket: a sun-washed desert framed by a painted archway, as if the wall itself opened onto the landscape just beyond. Sparse shrubs dot the sandy plain of the Death Valley desert floor, while the two low, colonnaded ruins of the complex stretch inward from either side, their repeating arches casting long, rhythmic shadows. Soft brown swirls suggest the gusts of powerful winds that blow across the valley.
In the distance, above the Black Mountain range to the west, a ghostly silhouette of Becket in her tulle ballet skirt spirals into the sky.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A ghost town opera house battles the elements.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
