Borax Museum

Death Valley National Park

The Borax museum is an outdoor museum exhibiting machinery and vehicles used by the Pacific Coast Borax Company in their Death Valley mining operations. 

20 Mule Team wagon trains were used to haul 24 tons of borax 165 miles from Death Valley to Mojave.

Steam powered trains eventually replaced the 20 Mule Teams.

Ubehebe Crater

Death Valley National Park > Ubehebe Crater

Stovepipe Well

Death Valley National Park

The well was once at the intersection of two trails through Death Valley. After sand obscured the spot, someone stuck a piece of stovepipe into the well as a marker.

Bottle House

One of the few buildings still standing in Rhyolite is a house made of glass and adobe. A local saloon owner, Tom Kelly, built this house in 1906 using materials he had in abundance: 51,000 beer bottles and mud.

Rhyolite

Rhyolite was a town near the eastern edge of Death Valley that began as a mining camp in 1905. Fueled by a gold rush, the town grew to nearly 5000 people in just a few years, but the easily accessible gold had all been exhumed in just a few years. By 1910, the mine was operating at a loss. The mine closed in 1911 and the town's population dove to fewer than 1000 peopl. By 1920, the town was abandoned and in ruins.

Tribute to Shorty Harris

Tribute to Shorty Harris

Fred Bervoets

1994

Shorty Harris (along with his partner Ernest Cross) struck gold in the Bullfrog Mountains in 1904, and sparked the gold rush that built Rhyolite. This sculpture portrays Shorty as a miner with a pick axe, and artist Belgian artist Fred Bervoets as an out-of-place does-not-belong-in-the-desert alien penguin.

Sit Here!

Sit Here!

Sofie Siegmann

2000

The Beauty of Decay

Posing with Onny Huisink's Decaying Puppets

These puppets are part of series of art installations of puppets by Onny Huisink. The puppets are left around the globe to decay -- to become casualties of their environment. Visitors are asked to take photos with the puppets to document the decay. As members of the four generations in my household pose with the puppets, I realize that the photos we take also document the beautiful decay and development of my own family.

Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada

There's a giant naked lady in the Nevada desert. She didn't escape from Minecraft. She is the cinder-block creation of Belgian artist Hugh Heyman.

Godzilla for scale

Origami

The Last Supper

The Last Supper

Charles Albert Szukalski

1984