Furnace Creek Ranch, Death Valley California 1972

This photograph captures Furnace Creek Ranch in the early 1970s, back when it still carried a distinctly frontier-style identity. The rustic stone pillars, wooden overhead beam, and branding-iron-shaped decor gave visitors the feeling they were entering an oasis outpost rather than a resort. At this time, the ranch served as the more relaxed alternative to the nearby Furnace Creek Inn (now The Oasis at Death Valley), which catered to a more upscale crowd.

The lineup of vehicles — from station wagons to vans and campers — tells a familiar American story of the era: families exploring national parks by road, long before mass tourism, giant tour buses, or TripAdvisor existed. The presence of palm trees and shade was no small luxury in a landscape famous for holding the highest air temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth.

Originally built by the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the 1920s, Furnace Creek Ranch developed alongside the region’s tourism boom, after the borax mines and the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad era faded. By 1972, it offered lodging, a pool fed by natural warm springs, a restaurant, and even a golf course — advertised as the lowest in the world at 214 feet below sea level.

Today, the ranch has been modernized and rebranded, yet much of its spirit remains unchanged. This photograph freezes it at a moment when Death Valley still felt remote and unpolished — a place where arriving felt like crossing a boundary into a land of extremes rather than checking into a desert resort.