Utah Part II: The Search for Art in the Middle of Nowhere

On Thursday, June 4th, we headed out from West Wendover, NV back into Utah on a truly obscure excursion: the search for Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (1973-1976). I first heard about the Sun Tunnels in an art history Western art survey course my freshman year of college. The last time I studied them though was the Fall semester of my senior year where we looked at them more in-depth, and also that whole Earthworks thing. So when I foound out the route from Denver to San Francisco required passage through Utah, I figured, why not go see this monument in the middle of nowhere, Utah? This is really only something someone with significant interest in art would ever want to do.

The Sun Tunnels really are in the middle of nowhere. Google maps doesn't even recognize much of the last part of the journey to them as on roads. The nearest humans are about 20 miles away. And the "town" that the tunnels are southeast of isn't actually a town at all, but a historical marker called Lucin. If you thought you have been to the middle of nowhere, chances are you haven't been on the dirt roads of Utah deep into the desert basin:

(This is still about 10 miles away from nowhere!)

On our way to the middle of nowehere we encountered a dust devil, which is the little twirling cloud of dust to the right of this road:

And it went right past us!

We also past some truly free-range cattle. These guys have no fences, and I don't think they had seen people in a long while, since they seemed a little spooked by us, aka, they actually looked up from grazing to check us out.