Scotty's Castle and Ubehebe Crater

January 18 - Day 1

Scotty's Castle

Scotty has quite a colorful history, and there are lots of books written about him and about Albert and Bessie Johnson, the Chicago millionaire who had the castle built.  Construction on this elaborate Spanish-style mansion began in 1922, and stopped in 1933, when Mr. Johnson discovered that it castle wasn't actually built on the ground he owned.  It was never completed.  But it was quite a sight, especially for the time period during which it was built, and occupied.

Inside Scotty's Castle

We bought our tickets for the "inside" tour, then met up with our tour guide, dressed in period clothes.  We went from room to room, and she gave a pretty good history of Scotty, who was actually a con man, and Albert Johnson (we assume no relation to Dave and Mazie, but one never knows) who came out here to see the gold mine he had invested in with Scotty, and fell in love with the area.

There was a great room, a library, Scotty's bedroom (which he never would sleep in, probably because no alcohol was allowed), the Johnsons' bedroom, and guest rooms, the kitchen, and others.  We took many, many pictures, but I've narrowed it down to just a few.

Outside Scotty's Castle

Joe and Mazie hiked up to the graves of Scotty and his faithful dog, Windy, but Dave and I opted out of that trip, and we walked around the grounds below.

We decided to take the "underground" tour as well, so we met our next guide over by the unfinished swimming pool, which would have been magnificent had it ever been completed.  It was huge, but when Mr. Hearst heard about it, he built one bigger at his castle over near the coast.  Mr. Johnson had underground tunnels built on the outside of his castle, those too were left unfinished, but we got to see what a massive undertaking that was.

We got to see the room where the house generators were, which went through many varieties as more modern ways to generate power became available.  In the second picture, our guide demonstrated that some of these still worked by getting the lights to come on.  We also got to see a hallway of house batteries, over 100, that were eventually used to provide electricity to the house.  Those batteries made 115 volts D.C.

Back above ground, we walked past a beautiful Joshua tree.  We had come through part of the Joshua National Forest on our drive on Sunday, but had never really seen one of these trees close-up.

Ubehebe Crater


Finally, we left there and headed to Ubehebe Crater, which was just a few miles back down the road.  This crater is one-half mile wide, and 500 ft. deep.  It was caused by a massive volcanic explosion a few hundred years ago.  I know the colors in these pictures just don't do justice to what we've seen.  Quite spectacular!

This was getting to be a long day, so we finally headed back to camp.  David especially loved this excursion to Scotty's Castle, in fact it was his favorite of the whole week.