Four miles southeast of the ghost town of Lucin in the flat valley of the Great Basin Desert, four massive concrete tunnels sit in the Utah desert like a 20th century Stonehenge — aligned with the solstice sun, pierced with constellation holes, and built on land that artist Nancy Holt purchased specifically because it was remote, flat, and empty enough to hold the scale of the idea she had been developing since 1973.

Glen and I visited with friends in 1995 — a trip into the northwestern Utah desert to see one of the more unusual and more rewarding art destinations in the American West. Sun Tunnels is the kind of place that rewards the drive precisely because the drive is part of the work. The remoteness is not incidental — it is the point.

The Work — What Sun Tunnels Is

Sun Tunnels (1973–76) is a Land Art installation by sculptor and filmmaker Nancy Holt — four concrete tunnels each 18 feet long and 9 feet in diameter, arranged in an X configuration on forty acres of desert that Holt purchased in 1974 specifically as the site for the work. The tunnels are aligned with the angles of the rising and setting sun on the days of the summer and winter solstices — around June 21 and December 21 — so that on those two days the sun rises and sets precisely framed within the tunnel openings, visible as concentric circles of light from inside.

Each tunnel is pierced with holes of varying sizes — the holes drilled in the pattern of four constellations: Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. During the day these holes cast spots of light across the dark interiors of the tunnels — appearing almost like stars, inverting the sky-ground relationship by bringing the night sky’s pattern down to the desert floor. As Holt described it: “It’s an inversion of the sky/ground relationship — bringing the sky down to the earth.”

The four tunnels are arranged so that when standing inside one, looking through the opening, another tunnel is visible in the distance — the X configuration creating sightlines across the desert in all four solstice directions simultaneously. The total length of the X configuration is 86 feet.

Holt described the conceptual foundation in her own words: “The idea for Sun Tunnels became clear to me while I was in the desert watching the sun rising and setting, keeping the time of the earth.” The work marks cyclical time — the annual solar calendar made physical and permanent in concrete on the desert floor.

Nancy Holt — The Artist

Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts and raised in New Jersey. She is internationally recognized for Sun Tunnels as a pioneering work of Land Art. Holt’s work consistently engaged the celestial — stars, sunlight, and orbiting bodies — in works that used the landscape itself as both medium and frame.

Holt was married to artist Robert Smithson — creator of Spiral Jetty (1970) on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, one of the other defining works of the Land Art movement. The two works — Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty — represent the two most significant Land Art installations in Utah and among the most important in North America. Both are now owned and stewarded by Dia Art Foundation, which acquired Sun Tunnels in 2018 with support from the Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Holt worked on Sun Tunnels from 1973 to 1976 — consulting with an astrophysicist at the University of Utah about the precise angles of the solstices at the latitude of her land, working with contractors unfamiliar with art installations in the remote desert, and documenting the construction in a film she produced of the process. She died in 2014. Sun Tunnels continues to be visited year-round.

The Land Art Movement

Sun Tunnels belongs to the Land Art movement — also called Earthworks or Environmental Art — that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s when a generation of artists including Holt, Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria moved their work out of galleries and into the landscape itself. The American West provided the scale, the remoteness, and the geological drama that the work required. Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico became the primary sites.

The defining characteristic of Land Art is that the work cannot be separated from its location — it cannot be moved to a museum, photographed in full, or experienced without the specific landscape that surrounds it. Sun Tunnels without the Great Basin Desert flat, without the specific light of the Utah sky, without the remoteness of the drive to reach it — is not Sun Tunnels. The land is the art.

The Solstice Experience

The two days each year when Sun Tunnels fully reveals its alignment — the summer solstice around June 21 and the winter solstice around December 21 — are when the work is most visited and most dramatic. On solstice mornings crowds gather before dawn in the dark desert to watch the sun rise precisely centered in the tunnel opening — the concrete frame and the rising sun forming concentric circles of light that the entire work was designed to produce.

Our 1995 visit was on the summer solstice — June 21, 1995 — which delivered exactly what the work was designed to produce on that one day each year. Watching the sun set precisely centered in the tunnel opening — the concrete frame and the descending sun forming concentric circles of light in the Great Basin Desert — is the full Sun Tunnels experience. It is the reason Nancy Holt spent three years designing and building the work with an astrophysicist’s input on the exact solstice angles at this latitude. We were there for it. The constellation holes, the desert scale, the sightlines between tunnel openings — all of that is present on any visit. But the solstice alignment is what Sun Tunnels was built for, and a June 21 sunset in the Utah desert inside one of those tunnels is something to see.

Practical Notes

Sun Tunnels is located on private land — forty acres purchased by Nancy Holt in 1974 — now owned by Dia Art Foundation. The site is open to visitors year-round at no charge. There are no facilities — no restrooms, no water, no services of any kind. The nearest settlement is Lucin, four miles away — now essentially a ghost town with no remaining services.

The access road is several miles of dirt and gravel from the highway — patchy and rough in sections but passable for most vehicles in dry conditions. The road may become impassable after rain or snow — verify conditions before the drive. Download maps before leaving cell service range — there is no cell service at the site.

More Information:

• Access road: several miles of dirt and gravel — passable for most vehicles in dry conditions, may be impassable after rain or snow

• Peak visit dates: summer solstice (~June 21) and winter solstice (~December 21)

• Owned and stewarded by Dia Art Foundation since 2018

• Photographic and video material of Sun Tunnels is copyright protected — Holt/Smithson Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Contact:

Dia Art Foundation

suntunnels@diaart.org

diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites/nancy-holt-sun-tunnels

Hours: Open year-round, no set hours — daylight visits recommended

Admission: Free

Sun Tunnels (1973–76) by Nancy Holt. © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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