Fun Camp – Uncovering Death Valley’s forgotten history

It’s Fake News Friday! 

“Fun Camp”

In the mid 1800s, with a booming gold rush turning once-filthy miners into Izod-shirt wearing, boat-shoe clad member of the nouveau riche, the miners of Death Valley decided to upgrade their standard of living and send for their estranged families. Unfortunately, as the kids of Death Valley soon discovered, there wasn’t much to do in Death Valley other than work in the mines. Landscape photography was a pursuit relegated to opium addicts and the criminally drunk, and social media bullying still hadn’t been invented. Children, tired of traditional diversions such as “Kick the Cat” and “Whip the Burro,” were in desperate need of some entertainment.

This necessity resulted in a number of children-oriented structures being built: First, a one-room schoolhouse, then a hugely unpopular wooden slide, and finally a high-elevation summer camp perched far above the valley floor and away from the valley’s main settlements. This camp was aptly named “Fun Camp.”

With the summer weather in Death Valley being generally unfit for both man and beast, the mothers of Death Valley had sought out a location at higher elevations where they could drop their kids off for the summer to learn some of the lost pioneer arts of their forefathers, such as animal husbandry, husband wifery, and fence whitewashing. At 4,000 feet above sea level, the location for Fun Camp was a bit of an anomaly, as it rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit all summer long due to coastal zephyrs that, as one 19th century writer put it, “Flowed o’er the seas, gathering up its coolness and finally spat that coolness upon the upper flank of the Panamint Range like so much chewing tobacco in a spittoon.”

During the spring of 1866, dozens of barracks were built. In the summer of 1866 the first group of kids moved in. Over the following decades a number of improvements were made to the 15-acre grounds, including something called a “swimming hall,” rudimentary thrill rides, and what historians later believed to be a sacrificial altar.

But despite all this fun, the camp had its problems. Hilarious but fatal dingo attacks were reported to have occurred on a somewhat frequent basis, and even the most basic of injuries were treated poorly, mostly because not a single adult was onsite from June to August, a detail that the mothers of Death Valley had overlooked in their desperation to rid themselves of a seemingly never-ending chorus of “We’re boooooored.” Some things never change!

In 1931, the newly formed Child Protective Services made raiding Fun Camp their first order of business. The camp was closed, and CPS cited unsafe living conditions, amusement park rides that had been both created from and fixed with duct tape, and a plethora of shallow unmarked graves filled with tiny child-sized bones as the reasons.

Pictured in this photo are Fun Camp’s swimming hall, the pub, and the ticket booth for the world’s very first Tilt-a-Whirl. The structures have been preserved impeccably because of the quick and decisive work of a collective of historians named the Fathers of the Eastern Sierras, who in 1933, two years after Fun Camp’s closing, loaded a dozen 20-mule-trains with some 80,000 gallons of epoxy resin and made the long and arduous trek up to Fun Camp, where they used the epoxy resin to coat the entire site for posterity, thus preserving an important but oft-forgotten part of American history.