Carhenge
📍 Nebraska, Alliance
Stonehenge rebuilt from 39 gray-painted vintage American cars on the Nebraska plains — a son's memorial to his father, and the High Plains' strangest monument.
Stonehenge, but make it Detroit
Jim Reinders studied the real Stonehenge while living in England, then came home to Nebraska and rebuilt it out of cars. Dedicated at the 1987 summer solstice as a memorial to his father, Carhenge arranges 39 vintage automobiles — some buried trunk-down in 5-foot pits, others welded into arches overhead — in a 96-foot circle painted uniform gray to mimic standing stones.
It faithfully copies the original’s proportions and solar alignment. Additional car-art sculptures have since gathered around it in the “Car Art Reserve.”
Visiting
- Free, open dawn to dusk, three miles north of Alliance on Highway 87.
- Big-sky isolation; the drive out is part of the experience.
- Best at solstice or sunset, when the alignment does its thing.
🐿️ Cinnamon was here
Field report
Somewhere in a Nebraska library there is a book about Stonehenge with my pawprints on it, because I read it the week before a farmer mentioned 'the car one, up by Alliance.'
Carhenge is Stonehenge rebuilt at full scale from 39 gray-painted vintage American cars, planted trunk-down on the High Plains — a son's memorial to his father, which is the detail everyone forgets and the one that matters. I sat on a tailfin lintel at sunset while the shadows did exactly what the real ones do at Salisbury, probably. I haven't been. The pigeons there are said to be unbearable.
Free, always open, wind included. The humans circle it twice, laugh, go quiet, then circle again slower. Correct procedure. Gray paint on gray sky on gold grass: my journal's favorite page this year.
— Cinnamon 🐿️
📸 Cinnamon's camera roll
Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.
Where it is
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House on the Rock
Pinball Hall of Fame
Seven Magic Mountains
Zzyzx — Desert Oasis at the End of the Alphabet
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