Rhyolite

After the magical sunrise at Mono Lake, we drove east on 120, a beautiful road that brought us into Nevada, and then south to the town of Beatty, near the eastern entrance to Death Valley.

However, we couldn’t just breeze through Beatty without a stop at one of our favorite outdoor sculpture museums – the Goldwell Open Air Museum in Rhyolite. This place is literally in the middle of nowhere.

The museum, which is open to the public 24 hours a day 7 days a week, has seven monumental outdoor sculptures that are colossal not only in their scale, but in their dramatic setting amongst mountains and the Mojave Desert. It was precisely this stark setting that attracted a group of Belgian artists in the 1980s to choose this location to create their art.

My two favorites sculptures were by Albert Szukalski, and they both involve an unusual technique he developed in which a live model is draped in plaster-soaked burlap and has to remain still until the plaster dries enough to stand on its own. I can’t even begin to imagine how uncomfortable this must have been for the models. It gets really, really hot here.

Szukalski’s largest work is entitled “The Last Supper,” and it consists of 12 white ghostly shapes arranged as in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the same name. The shapes have no faces or bodies – just drapes hanging on an invisible form.

My second favorite was aptly called “Ghost Rider.” As in Szukalski’s other works, a ghostly draped figure – minus the body inside – stood beside an actual real bicycle, as if it was getting ready to go for a ride.

However, I also love the sculpture of the giant prospector wielding a large pickaxe Unbeknownst to Herb, I always place him under that axe - just for fun.

For anyone passing through this area, the Goldwell Open Air Museum is truly worth a visit. Plus, just up the road is the Rhyolite Ghost Town, the remnants of a mining town that sprung up in 1904, grew to a population of over 5,000 people, and then went bust by 1911. Now it is just a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures, where you can still see some remnants of the town’s glory days: the railway depot, the Bottle House, and the ruins of the 3 story bank and old jail.

However, since we had seen the ghost town on previous trips and wanted to get through Titus Canyon in daylight, we skipped it and continued on.