Scotty’s Castle is one of the more remarkable historic residences in the U.S. west, especially considering it’s not really a castle and it was never owned by Scotty. It’s a 32,000-square-foot Moorish-style villa in a remote northern corner of Death Valley National Park, roughly three hours from Las Vegas (tours to Scotty’s stop first at Beatty, Nevada, a two-hour drive northwest of the city; Scotty’s Castle is a little more than an hour from Beatty.)
The Castle was built in the 1920s and 1930s by Albert Johnson, a Chicago insurance executive, who was introduced to Death Valley by a con man named Walter "Death Valley Scotty" Scott.
It’s a long story in which a lasting friendship between Johnson and Scott, and a love of Death Valley by both, trumped an earlier betrayal of Johnson by Scott in a mining scam, which you can google if you want the whole sordid tale (a good description of the two men is found at desertusa.com/mag98.june/papr/du_dvscotty).
Tours through the house, which features heavy wood ceilings, hand-crafted wrought iron, imported finishes, custom European furniture, fine tapestries, even a 1,121-pipe organ, are conducted by National Park Service naturalists. A separate tour takes visitors through the basement of the villa for a look at the technology, considered highly advanced for the time and place, that provided water and electricity to the villa.
You can see a YouTube video of part of the house tour at youtube.
As for trips to Death Valley, all the major Las Vegas tour companies offer day trips to Death Valley, though most of them focus on the southern half of the park (the Zabriskie Point and Dante’s View scenic overlooks, the colorful Artist’s Drive, and Badwater, the lowest spot on the continent at 282 feet below sea level) and the central park (the village at Stovepipe Wells and the resort at Furnace Creek).
We found only one that goes the extra hour each way on a regularly scheduled tour to Scotty’s Castle. Canyon Tours offers an 11-hour tour three days a week via Beatty to the Castle, then on to Ubehebe Crater, Furnace Creek, and Badwater ($199).
Unfortunately, you’re right: Due to the extreme heat (they don’t call it Death Valley for nothing), most of the major tour companies out of Las Vegas suspend their regularly scheduled trips to the national park between May 31 and September 1 -- and Canyon Tours is among them.
We didn’t give up there, though. We called a few tour companies that advertised custom tours and were told that they’re willing to customize a tour to Scotty’s Castle. However, the charges are based on the number of seats in the vehicle. Pink Jeep Tours, for example, has 10-passenger vehicles, of which 8 seats would need to be filled or paid for (a small discount on the seats is washed out by an automatic gratuity for the driver-guide). Adventure Photo Tours offers 7 seat SUVs, of which 6 would need to be paid for (again, not including the gratuity). Neither outfit got back to us with a quote.
Another idea would be to hire a personal-driver service, such as lasvegaspersonaldriver.com or one of the limo companies, though hiring a limo or Town Car for a roughly 400-mile round-trip, over 10 hours, the cost would almost certainly be prohibitive.
All in all, without being able to drive there yourself, and coming in the summer, this seems to be the rare case of you can’t there from here (at an affordable cost, anyway). If your heart is set on seeing the Castle, it’s probably best to come back to Las Vegas during the Death Valley season, September-May, and take the regularly scheduled Canyon Tours trip for a couple hundred bucks.
