WEBVTT 00:00:06.880 --> 00:00:10.570 It's been three years since our flood occurred and destroyed the 00:00:10.570 --> 00:00:16.570 infrastructure on site at Scotty's Castle and so we have been working 00:00:16.570 --> 00:00:22.050 towards planning for the future and one of the things that we realized 00:00:22.050 --> 00:00:26.769 while we were conducting this planning was that we would have to move the 00:00:26.769 --> 00:00:34.300 collections for a number of reasons and these included complications due to the 00:00:34.300 --> 00:00:39.370 loss of our water system the loss of electricity and the loss of a good 00:00:39.370 --> 00:00:42.980 number of staff who helped care for this collection. 00:00:44.820 --> 00:00:51.000 Quite a bit of work has been done on-site to prepare for the repair of our 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:57.560 infrastructure and our buildings and to care for our museum collections. 00:00:58.140 --> 00:01:03.420 We're planning on improvements from what the castle was like before the flood but 00:01:03.430 --> 00:01:09.070 we're also looking at keeping the historic nature of the collection intact 00:01:09.070 --> 00:01:11.800 and the buildings and the site of course. 00:01:14.880 --> 00:01:20.880 Our collections are being moved as we film and we are approximately two months 00:01:20.890 --> 00:01:26.619 into that move. The collections will be moved to a professional state-of-the-art 00:01:26.619 --> 00:01:32.650 museum storage facility where they will be very well cared for and still 00:01:32.650 --> 00:01:40.260 accessible to the curation division to allow us to remove objects for 00:01:40.260 --> 00:01:44.880 conservation projects that we will be undertaking in the next three years 00:01:44.880 --> 00:01:48.260 while the castle is closed. 00:01:50.600 --> 00:01:55.420 This flood, this move has allowed us to actually see 00:01:55.420 --> 00:02:02.620 all of our collections out of storage out of cupboards and to document it in 00:02:02.620 --> 00:02:07.510 addition to describing it a lot of it had never been described so that 00:02:07.510 --> 00:02:10.100 information will be available to research. 00:02:16.110 --> 00:02:22.500 These curtains have been in storage for years and they're really quite lovely 00:02:22.510 --> 00:02:28.930 they're from the lower music room they were taken off exhibit a couple decades 00:02:28.930 --> 00:02:36.130 ago actually mainly because of the deterioration so you can see along here 00:02:36.130 --> 00:02:42.610 how the fabric is pulled away from the binding and there was an attempt at 00:02:42.610 --> 00:02:49.030 conservation at some point this is a relatively modern fabric and it was 00:02:49.030 --> 00:02:54.970 unsuccessful so the curtains were put into storage this is one of the things 00:02:54.970 --> 00:02:59.500 that we're hoping to remedy while the castle is closed down we're hoping to 00:02:59.500 --> 00:03:04.600 have a lot of conservation work done on things like curtains that are severely 00:03:04.600 --> 00:03:09.820 damaged so that we can put them back in the rooms they were originally intended 00:03:09.820 --> 00:03:15.480 to be in and for those curtains that are too damaged we're hoping to have them reproduced. 00:03:18.260 --> 00:03:21.600 In addition to conservation projects that will be 00:03:21.600 --> 00:03:25.840 undertaken for museum collections we're also going to do some work on the 00:03:25.840 --> 00:03:32.019 buildings and this is an example of problems that we're seeing in the building 00:03:32.019 --> 00:03:37.120 this one is because water intrusion some of it through this door some of it 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:43.989 through the wall itself and we'll be repairing areas like this. We will also 00:03:43.989 --> 00:03:49.750 be putting in door sweeps at the tops of the doors and down through the sides and 00:03:49.750 --> 00:03:56.290 at the bottom. This will help with rodent control but also with controlling 00:03:56.290 --> 00:03:59.020 abrasive dusts which are coming into the building. 00:04:01.540 --> 00:04:09.200 So another area that we're working on in the castle is the organ pipe room. 00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:14.659 Our work during this time when Scotty's is shut down is taking care of things 00:04:14.659 --> 00:04:19.639 like deferred maintenance projects we wouldn't have time to do on our short 00:04:19.639 --> 00:04:25.910 service visits we're now being able to do some major adjustments to the console 00:04:25.910 --> 00:04:31.699 and a few reed pipes like the tuba and the trumpet that have been dirty and don't 00:04:31.699 --> 00:04:36.410 hold tuned as well we're able to take them back and clean them up and get them 00:04:36.410 --> 00:04:39.800 ready for another 30 or more years of service. 00:04:40.780 --> 00:04:43.400 The tone of these is is produced 00:04:43.400 --> 00:04:49.039 very much like an orchestral flute there's an opening although in this 00:04:49.039 --> 00:04:52.940 instance it's a rectangle and the air enters the pipe at the bottom blows 00:04:52.940 --> 00:04:57.530 across the opening and create, sets up an oscillation very much like going over 00:04:57.530 --> 00:05:00.740 the end of a coke bottle if you remember old-fashioned coke bottles. 00:05:04.060 --> 00:05:06.180 That's what you get there. 00:05:07.360 --> 00:05:12.500 That's quite a ring. There's a wooden one it's just made out of wood 00:05:12.500 --> 00:05:16.280 but it has exactly the same process the air enters at the bottom and blows 00:05:16.280 --> 00:05:17.940 across this opening. 00:05:20.200 --> 00:05:22.910 But quite a different tone. 00:05:24.340 --> 00:05:26.860 This work is being funded 00:05:26.860 --> 00:05:31.220 by private donations from the Death Valley Natural History Association to 00:05:31.220 --> 00:05:36.289 which we're very grateful they support not only our maintenance work here but 00:05:36.289 --> 00:05:40.159 also organ recitals and just generally keeping the organ going and 00:05:40.160 --> 00:05:43.580 then good condition so many visitors can enjoy it each year. 00:06:02.220 --> 00:06:06.919 It's not just a house in the desert it's everything that went into building 00:06:06.919 --> 00:06:11.120 this place and the people who went into building it in addition to the people 00:06:11.120 --> 00:06:17.509 who lived here. There are so many stories that can be told from this, this building 00:06:17.509 --> 00:06:24.620 this site. There's stories of of the miners who came through here of the 00:06:24.620 --> 00:06:30.889 railway that came to Bonny Claire. There are stories here of the Depression and 00:06:30.889 --> 00:06:36.650 the people who came here to work because they couldn't find work elsewhere and 00:06:36.650 --> 00:06:41.660 the people who lived in the area the Native Americans the Timbisha-Shoshone 00:06:41.660 --> 00:06:47.389 and the Paiute who came and lived on site and worked here. There are a lot of 00:06:47.389 --> 00:06:54.199 stories that can be told here that are not perhaps unique to Scotty's Castle but 00:06:54.200 --> 00:07:00.700 when they're brought all together they make for a very important story of our history.