Seven Magic Mountains
📍 Nevada, Las Vegas
Seven towers of fluorescent, stacked boulders rising 30+ feet from the Mojave — Ugo Rondinone's day-glo answer to the desert, 10 miles south of Las Vegas.
Neon boulders in the Ivanpah Valley
Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone stacked locally sourced limestone boulders into seven totems, each over 30 feet tall, then painted them in blazing fluorescent colors. Set against the beige Mojave and the distant mountains, they look like something a giant left behind.
Produced by the Nevada Museum of Art and Art Production Fund, the installation opened in May 2016 and is one of the largest land-art works completed in the US in over 40 years. Originally slated for a two-year run, popularity kept it standing.
Visiting
- Free, open during daylight, about 10 miles south of Las Vegas near Jean Dry Lake and I-15.
- No shade and desert heat — go early, bring water.
- Best light is early morning or golden hour, when the colors really pop.
🐿️ Cinnamon was here
Field report
Ghost popsicle's list sent me to Seven Magic Mountains: seven totems of boulders painted in fluorescent candy colors, stacked thirty-plus feet high in the empty Mojave ten miles south of Vegas — Ugo Rondinone dropping day-glo exclamation points into a landscape that speaks entirely in beige.
The joke and the genius are the same thing: there is NOTHING else out there, so the colors detonate. I climbed the orange-pink stack (advisory: art, hot to the touch by 10 a.m., climbing officially discouraged for creatures who show up on security cameras) and surveyed desert in every direction like a very small ranger of a very loud outpost.
Free, always open, brutal at noon — go at golden hour when the paint and the desert briefly agree. Vegas shimmer on the horizon completes the sentence.
— Cinnamon 🐿️
📸 Cinnamon's camera roll
Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.
Where it is
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