Site Report No. 10: Sun Tunnels, UT

Stopover: Wendover, Utah, a large and mostly unused former World War II airfield.  It was the home of the training program for the first atomic bombing missions.  The B-29 Enola Gay took off here en route for Hiroshima.

Later, we drive the Millennium Falcon (John’s nickname for our truck) onto the Bonneville Salt Flats--30,000 acres of ancient salt beds. This prehistoric sea is also a raceway where hundreds of land speed records have been set and broken.  (Ok, so we weren’t going 600 mph, we still drove on Bonneville).  Stepping onto the hard, tightly packed salt it crunches like snow. I reach down to scoop some in my hand it falls away like wet clumps of common table salt.  It is one of the flattest places on Earth, where its curvature can be perceived.  The immense field of stark whiteness combined with the intense blue sky made it penetratingly bright. 

46 miles off Route 80 through the desert mountain range to the Ghost town of Lucin, Utah.  A placard tells us that the Lucin ponds were developed in the 1800’s for railroad steam engines.  It is now called an “oasis in the desert” for wildlife.  I don’t see any signs of water.  Miles more of dusty road.  Then small dots on the horizon of the Great Basin Desert.  What are those?  As we get closer, the scale shifts and we see monumental concrete tubes.  It’s Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76).  Four concrete tubes sit in two lines to form an open X shape and are aligned along the axis of the sun during the summer and winter solstices.  In these tubes are drilled holes of different sizes and correspond to representations of constellations: Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricornus.  The sun shines through the holes to create a pattern of circles and ellipses on the sides and bottom of the tubes.  The pattern is what she called “an inversion of the sky.”  Around the base of the tubes, birds have nested in the shadow spaces.  Walking inside the tubes, I can see the projected shapes caused by the midday sun.  The temperature inside the concrete is much cooler than the outside.  Through each tunnel, the landscape is framed, brought into focus.  There is the open desert range and the Grouse Creek Mountains in the distance.  We spend hours here without seeing any other people.  Fighter jets from a nearby airfield fly overhead.