Marble Bath

A quirky sliver of bath time luxury hides within plain sight off a stretch of desert road. Thanks to a cartographic mixup and one desert explorer’s cheeky sense of humor, this cast iron bathtub remains buried in a wash and filled with blue marbles.

The story behind this tub goes something like this: There’s a location shown on various topographical maps called Marble Bath. The actual location marks a set of shallow decompressions in the bedrock near the Last Chance Mountains. The dips fill with rainwater and become a rare, precious source of water within an otherwise arid stretch of desert.

But on some older maps, Marble Bath isn’t quite where the cartographers say it is. This false location is shown closer to Steel Pass Road and has fooled many a hiker on a quest to locate the ephemeral pools of water.

Before the area became part of Death Valley National Park, to validate the erroneous maps in a good-natured way, a desert explorer, research chemist, inventor, mountaineer, and an all-around good guy named Wendel Moyer decided to prank the unknowing. Moyer recruited a few friends and rounded up an old bathtub and many, many boxes of blue marbles.

They installed the tub in the bogus location that was misidentified as Marble Bath on the erroneous maps. Moyer’s Marble Bath remains where he installed it the early 1990s. Hikers continue to keep it stocked with a sea of blue marbles, and sometimes even throw in a rubber duck or two for good measure.

Moyer sadly died just after climbing Chile’s 22,000-foot-tall Ojas del Salado in 1995, though were he still alive, he’d no doubt be pleased at the whimsical joy his prank has brought so many travelers.