Limited tours are returning to one of Death Valley’s most unusual landmarks, but RVers will need to plan ahead.
If you’re mapping out a winter or early-spring RV trip through Death Valley National Park, a long-closed landmark is finally edging back onto the itinerary. Scotty’s Castle, the eccentric 1920s estate tucked into Grapevine Canyon, is offering limited guided tours after more than a decade of closures tied to flooding, fire damage, and slow-going restoration work.
The castle has been closed since powerful flash floods swept through this part of Death Valley in 2015. The floods washed out roads and damaged utilities. More weather trouble—and a later fire—kept pushing reopening plans down the road.
While a full public reopening is still years away, the National Park Service is now easing visitors back in through a small number of guided Flood Recovery Tours.
Those tours run only on select Sundays through March. Tickets must be purchased in advance; group sizes are intentionally small. The emphasis is on both the castle’s offbeat history and the behind-the-scenes work it has taken to stabilize and preserve the site.
For visitors, it’s less about wandering at your own pace and more about getting a guided look at a place most people haven’t been able to see in years.
How RVers can plan a Scotty’s Castle stop
For RVers, the trick to seeing Scotty’s Castle is simple but important. Plan around the tour date first, then build the rest of your Death Valley stay to fit.
Most RVers enter the park from the south via CA-190 and base camp near Furnace Creek or Stovepipe Wells. Both offer campground options that work well for self-contained rigs and provide relatively easy access to fuel, supplies, and visitor services. Spending a day or two exploring south-end classics—Badwater Basin, Artist Drive, Zabriskie Point, and Dante’s View—keeps driving reasonable while giving you a sense of just how vast Death Valley really is.
Plan for a longer day to the park’s north end
The Scotty’s Castle tour day is different. The site sits in the park’s quieter northern district, and getting there usually means an early start and a longer drive. Services are sparse along the way, so fueling up, carrying extra water, and checking road conditions ahead of time are must-dos. That’s especially true in winter when temperatures can swing dramatically between the valley floor and higher elevations.
Because tours are offered only on specific dates and will likely sell out, many RVers will find it easiest to lock in reservations first, then adjust campground stays and sightseeing days around that fixed point.
Even in this limited form, Scotty’s Castle’s return adds a new wrinkle—and a rare opportunity—to a Death Valley visit.
For RVers, Scotty’s Castle isn’t a roll-in-and-see stop this season—it’s the kind of place you circle on the calendar and plan the rest of the trip around.
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RVT1246b
I have visited Scotty’s Castle several times. The first time was in 1950 with a boyfriend. We two guys were high school seniors on Spring break from Burbank High in Burbank, California. We arrived in Death Valley at a very pitch-black night and needed a place to camp with our minimal gear consisting of a couple of sleeping bags, a white gas Coleman stove, a pot and a skillet and some food. Having no idea where to camp, no campgrounds then, we stopped roadside, went down the sandy slope and slept well. In the daylight it was a wash. Glad it didn’t rain.