Monumental

Nothing can prepare you for a visit to Michael Heizer’s epic artwork in the middle of the harsh Nevada desert

- James Tarmy

After an hour inside the 299 acres that make up artist Michael Heizer’s City, a white Chevy Tahoe emerged from around one of the site’s colossal, gravel-covered mounds. It was my driver, Ed, there to tell me that storm clouds were fast approaching across the Nevada basin. Would I like to take refuge in the car? No, I would not: I had only a finite amount of time to take in the immensity of Heizer’s magnum opus before heading back to Las Vegas; I couldn’t waste precious minutes sitting around.

Ed disappeared beyond yet another of City’s seemingly endless walls and valleys, gone just in time for a drizzle to turn into serious rain and for me to regret declining his offer.

Searching for shelter across the vast expanse, I headed roughly a quarter-mile away to a concrete mountain adorned with angled slabs that Heizer calls “steles.” In a half-walk, half-jog, I made it up the structure’s dirt ramp just as the sky opened. For at least 10 minutes I huddled there, surveying the entirety of Heizer’s wildly ambitious creation in the shadow of a roughly 42-foot-high stele while rain poured around me.

City is so big—roughly half the size of Manhattan’s Central Park and a mile and a half from end to end—that its enormous dirt plazas, gentle stone slopes, and patches of green seem to go on indefinitely. Browns and grays fade, indistinctly, into the mountain ranges on the horizon.