The Sun Tunnels: Utah's Other Great Earthwork, and How to Find It

Utah’s Sun Tunnels are four massive concrete cylinders laid out in a giant X on the floor of the Great Basin Desert, built by the artist Nancy Holt between 1973 and 1976 to frame the rising and setting sun on the summer and winter solstices. Each tube is 18 feet long, 9 feet across, and weighs 22 tons. They sit on 40 acres of open scrubland near the ghost town of Lucin, in the far northwest corner of the state, and you can walk right up to them for free. 2026 marks their 50th year.

If you know one piece of Utah land art, it’s probably the Spiral Jetty — Robert Smithson’s basalt coil out on the Great Salt Lake. The Sun Tunnels are its quieter twin. Same decade, same desert, but made by Smithson’s wife and fellow artist, set another ninety minutes deeper into nowhere, and visited by a tiny fraction of the crowd. That’s the whole appeal. You will very likely have them to yourself.

Who was Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt was a leading figure in the land-art movement, the group of artists who in the late 1960s and ’70s walked away from galleries and started making work directly in the American West — Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s desert cuts, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field over in New Mexico. Holt’s medium was often perception itself: how we look, and what a frame does to what we see.

She first came out to the Great Basin in the early 1970s and fell for the flatness of it, the way the desert floor met the sky with almost nothing in between. In 1974 she bought 40 acres of that emptiness. Then she spent the better part of two years, a lot of her own money, and a small crew of surveyors, astronomers, and engineers turning it into a machine for watching the sun.

What the Sun Tunnels actually are

Four cylinders of cast concrete, each one 18 feet long and 9 feet in diameter — big enough to stand up inside — weighing 22 tons apiece. Holt arranged them in an open X, two tubes and two tubes, splayed so the whole arrangement stretches 86 feet along its diagonal.

The layout isn’t decorative. The tunnels are aimed. On the morning of the summer solstice, the sun rises dead center through one pair; that evening it sets through the other. Six months later, on the winter solstice, the low sun lines up through the opposite pair. Holt worked with the actual angles of the Utah horizon to get it right. For a few days around each solstice, if you’re standing in the correct tube at the correct hour, the desert sun sits framed in a perfect ring of concrete.

Then there’s the part people don’t expect. Look at the top half of each tunnel and you’ll see it’s pierced with holes — different tubes, different patterns. Those aren’t random. Each cylinder is drilled to match the stars of a real constellation: Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. The holes come in four sizes — 7, 8, 9, and 10 inches across — and the size tracks the brightness of the star it stands for. Brighter star, bigger hole.

On a sunny day, all of that turns the inside of a tunnel into a small planetarium. Daylight pours through the drilled holes and throws glowing ovals of sun across the shaded concrete, a scatter of little suns standing in for stars. Because the concrete wall is more than seven inches thick, the light usually lands as a pointed ellipse; when the sun swings directly over a hole, it briefly casts a clean circle. The stars come out at midday, which is exactly the reversal Holt was after.

Why they’re worth the drive

The Sun Tunnels do something the Spiral Jetty doesn’t. The Jetty is a thing you look at. The Tunnels are a thing you look through — and stand inside, and wait in. Holt built the frames; the desert, the sun, and the hour you happen to show up supply the rest. Come at noon and you get the starlight. Come at dusk and you get long shadows and a horizon that runs unbroken in every direction. Come on the solstice and you get the alignment the whole thing was designed around.

There’s also the plain fact of solitude. This is one of the emptiest quarters of Utah, and the work sits on private foundation land with no visitor center, no rangers, and usually no other cars. For a lot of people the silence is the point.

How to get to the Sun Tunnels

Plan on roughly four hours of driving from Salt Lake City, most of it fast highway and the last stretch gravel. Take I-80 west through Wendover to Oasis, Nevada. At Oasis, pick up Nevada Highway 233 north through the town of Montello — this is your last chance for gas, water, food, or a bathroom. Montello sits about 45 minutes from the site. Stay on that road as it crosses back into Utah and becomes Utah Highway 30. About 8 miles past the state line you’ll see a sign for Lucin; two gravel roads branch off to the right, and they lead to a small parking area at the tunnels.

The site is open year-round, day and night, and it’s free. In 2018 the Dia Art Foundation took over the work with the Holt/Smithson Foundation to preserve it, but nothing about visiting changed — there’s no gate and no fee.

The honest part

This is a long way to go for four concrete pipes, and it earns the trip only if you go in with your eyes open. There are no bathrooms, no drinking water, no food, and no fuel anywhere near the tunnels. The nearest services are back in Montello, about 45 minutes off. Cell coverage is thin to nonexistent. In July the Great Basin bakes, and there is no shade out here except the inside of a tunnel. Top off the tank in Montello, carry far more water than you think you need, tell someone your plan, and don’t count on your phone to bail you out.

Go prepared and the reward is rare: a half-century-old work of art, tuned to the sun and the stars, standing alone in one of the quietest landscapes in the country — and almost certainly all yours for the afternoon.