Roadtrip to California: Thunder Mountain Indian Monument

The Thunder Mountain Indian Monument is the strangest, most interesting, least traveled tourist destination I’ve ever been to!

It’s near Imlay, Nevada. It looked like a theme park gone-wrong on first glimpse. But after closer investigation there is a lot more to it.

Frank Van Zant built this monument to remember and honor Native American’s. Here is an exerpt from the web site:

“Van Zant’s three-story monument started out as a one-room travel trailer, which he gradually rocked over until it came to resemble Barney Rubble’s stone-age bungalow.

As materials became available, he added corridors and stairways leading to upstairs bedrooms formed of daub-and-bottle walls and slate ceilings.

He turned automobile windshields into picture windows, scrap iron and galvanized pipe into rebar, concrete and chicken wire into ornamental statuary.

Virtually every square foot of the monument’s exterior is covered with friezes and bas-relief tableaux depicting historic massacres and/or bureaucratic betrayals visited upon the American Indian.

–thundermountainmonument.com

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