Born in NY in 1925, Marta would live a life entirely alien to her contemporaries. As a child, she supported her family with modeling, dancing and artwork comissions. She had even worked on Broadway and the Radio City Music Hall. In 1967 Marta was on a long camping trip with her husband, and ended up breaking down in the hot and windy village of Death Valley Junction, CA.
**The mysterious rocks of Racetrack Playa**
While stranded and awaiting the repair, she poked around the town and fell in love with the local but abandoned theatre. It was known at the time as Corkhill Hall, and completed by the Borax Soap Company in 1925. She had found a home for her one-woman show, and began making plans to acquire it.
She would often dance to an empty theatre in the early days..and even today. She began to paint murals on the walls of an "audience" to keep her company, heated still by a pot-bellied stove to this day (Death Valley winters are strikingly harsh). Her husband long dead, Marta remains as the sole population number for Death Valley Junction. She opens her theatre every day, visitors or not, and performs as much of her show as she can. She mostly talks to the visitors now, kind of a living history lesson in her eighties. The show is not the draw at the Amargosa. It never has been. It's Marta, and her magic lifetime of performance art. She will make you cry a little and you aren't sure why, but not in a bad way. She represents something in all of us that we rarely pursue. To chase your life's dream to a place like this is something few are willing to do.
Marta is all alone now in her Death Valley Junction home...population 1. Now is your chance to go keep her company. The riding here in the fall/early winter is epic on a grand scale. Ghost towns, abandoned mines, Scotty's Castle, Badwater..all things you really should experience. You can start in the fuel-stop town of Baker, California (the Greek place is really good, by the way) which is about half way between Ontario Int'l Airport and Las Vegas' McCarren Airport. Ride in to the National Park via State Route 127, which travels north from Baker to Shoshone and Death Valley Junction. There are campgrounds inside the park, and a hotel..but they fill up quick.
Contact the Furnace Creek Visitor Center at (760) 786-3200. You can end up all the way out at the base of the Sierra Nevada range at Lone Pine if you are lucky. If you are REALLY lucky, you'll get there right after a 100 year flood and get to witness something few have the chance to..ancient flowers bursting through the rock, and enormous shallow lakes that are so salty they will eat your shoes.
Go to the Amargosa Theatre as fast as you can, as soon as you can and sit with Marta before it's too late...
...for you.
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