Theme

Land Art

6 destinations along 6 roads

Land art uses the ground itself as material, which is what separates it from a roadside oddity. Robert Smithson laid the Spiral Jetty out of Great Salt Lake's own basalt in 1970, and the lake decides whether you see it — submerged for three decades, salt-crusted and walkable in drought. Ricardo Breceda's metal beasts run loose across open desert at Borrego Springs. Two answer a ruin that came first: plaster shrouds at Rhyolite, upended cars at Goldfield. And Salvation Mountain is not art-world work at all — thirty years of one man's donated paint, and it never pretended otherwise.

S-22 (Borrego Salton Seaway)1

Borrego Springs

Borrego Springs

A dark-sky town ringed by state park, with 130 metal beasts loose in the desert around it.

US-951

Goldfield

Goldfield

Once the largest city in Nevada, now a few hundred souls — the purest boom-and-bust in the West, with a castle courthouse still in use, a grand hotel dark since the war, and a desert full of upended cars.

Beal Road (off CA-111)1

Salvation Mountain

Niland

One man, thirty years, half a million gallons of donated paint, and a hill that says God is Love.

CA-1111

Bombay Beach

Niland

The lowest town in America: a drowned resort turned open-air art colony, 223 feet below sea level.

NV-374 / US-951

Rhyolite

Beatty

The most complete ghost town in Nevada — a stone city with an opera house and a marble-stepped bank that rose and died inside a decade, now the most photographed ruin in the West.

Spiral Jetty Road1

Spiral Jetty

Brigham City

Robert Smithsons iconic land art masterpiece on the Great Salt Lake

Related tags

FreePhotographyWinterOff the Beaten PathWeird & WonderfulIconicGhost TownsStargazing