In 1970, the year Michael Heizer started building City in Lincoln County, the region recorded 9.6 inches of average annual precipitation. It seemed like a normal water year for the Great Basin Desert, perhaps slightly lower than average. But over the course of the 50 years Heizer spent on his monumental piece of land art, that number would decline, to a low of 5.64 inches in 2020. Winter fat, a low, gray shrub that feeds many creatures throughout the region’s valleys, died off, and so did the jackrabbits, deer, and the mountain lions, bobcats, and coyotes, which ate the rabbits and deer.
“What it really hurt was the wildlife,” said Ed Higbee, the local driver shepherding a group of us to City, in the remote Garden Valley, on an afternoon in early May. He was still waiting for the deer population to bounce back.
I’d been warned not to feature Ed prominently in my coverage of City, since he’s become a staple character for journalists who make the trek out to rural central Nevada to see Heizer’s behemoth. But Ed felt essential to City, as did Kris Vagner, editor of the Reno-based publication Double Scoop and a fellow visitor, who offered me homemade cold brew immediately after I arrived at the quaint clapboard office of the Triple Aught Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees the artwork, in Alamo. I wanted to visit City because I’d never seen a work of land art before, and I wanted to know how this particular piece related to its environment, the high desert. To survive in the high desert, you need plenty of water, and protection from the heat, sun, wind, and cold. Ideally, you’re not out there alone. Ed and Kris were providing these things, and so they seemed like part of the art, because what was land art without its context? Or so I’d been led to believe.
In reality, the experience of City started hours before my colleague and I arrived in Alamo. As the meticulous itinerary from the Triple Aught Foundation suggested, City began the moment we left Las Vegas, and continued as we drove north past the Speedway and Nellis Air Force Base, the large solar project Eagle Shadow Mountain, and past the Coyote Springs golf club, where, earlier this year, the Nevada Supreme Court blocked the development of a master-planned community that threatened the region’s groundwater and the endangered Moapa dace. Sites of extraction haunted the whole drive.
A little after 2:30 p.m., six of us gathered our hats and jackets and piled into the Foundation’s white Chevy Tahoe. The afternoon was warm and bright, but the weather in Garden Valley could be capricious, especially as clouds rolled in, Ed warned us. He steered us northwest, unraveling the history of the region as he drove. His ancestors, who, like most people in town, were Mormon, came to the Pahranagat Valley from Utah in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Their lifestyle was wiping out the ranges,” he said. “Too many cattle, too many horses. So, they had to spread out. And they found this valley with all this water.” (The Nuwuvi had already been there.)
On the day we visited, there was a lot of water — in the springs, the lakes. Certainly more water than in recent years: In 2023, Lincoln County registered 14.98 inches of precipitation, a needed relief from the decades-long megadrought. We drove past the Whipple Ranch and the LDS Church Ranch and the Cannon Ranch, down the dirt road that marked the start of Great Basin National Monument, through sagebrush foothills dotted with blooming, gnarled juniper, across a red rock canyon, and into a great valley. The colors were magnificent: soft blue and mint green, ochre, cream. The sky was boundless. Five antelopes chased the car from a half a mile away.
We approached Heizer’s ranch. I wondered out loud how much water City had required for construction and upkeep; workers, we’d been told, raked away footprints from City’s path after each visit, and, in a story that published last year, a New Yorker writer had reported seeing a cloud of dust in the sky before he arrived. I wanted to know much water City needed for dust suppression. Another writer pointed to an irrigated field on the property — probably alfalfa. Heizer did keep cattle on the ranch, and the field, the writer said, would use a lot more water.
Local ranchers suffered during the recent drought, Ed told us; cattle had little to graze. Later, I learned that in 2014, a ranching family surnamed Filippini herded their cattle on public lands near Battle Mountain, despite federal mandates restricting grazing. They also took drought subsidies, while, at the same time, denying the existence of a drought.
WHAT IS A CITY? We walked over dirt and pebble paths, trying to make sense of the brown and gray, the dust and stone, ledges and slopes, concrete and mounds, the depressions that Heizer created. The sweet smell of musky sage perfumed the air, and I spun around, trying to commit the jagged mountains and shifting sky to memory. The valley floor stretched out toward mountains to the north and south, and the land turned golden under the late afternoon sunlight, glistening as though a mirage.
Visitors are welcome to take in City as they please, so long as they don’t climb on the slopes and mounds — and climbing was tempting — but we chose to remain as a group, I think, because the place was so massive. It was nice to have company, and walking together imbued our three hours at City, a length of time that felt impossible to fill, with a sense of quest. As we walked, we tried to give language to what we saw, though we quickly gave up and instead tried to find words to describe how we felt. I’d avoided reading much about it ahead of time, but I knew the usual praise and criticism: incomprehensible and mystical, or hubristic and built on stolen land. Should I be mad? Should I be awed? I wanted to figure out how I felt, too.
A city usually has roads, buildings, houses, and buses. This city had complexes, One and Two, megastructures defined by their enormity and defiance of gravity. Both looked like meso-American worship sites, like monuments to what human power could accomplish, meant to long outlast their creator.
In a 2004 paper, anthropologist Andrew Irving named various types of cities: “the discursive city, the mythical city, the physical city,” and others. He added, too, a list from anthropologist Setha Low: “the ethnic city, divided city, gendered city … ”
No matter the type though, all cities have one thing in common: People, and lots of them. “Thus,” Irving wrote, “the city does not exist in an individual’s mind or ‘out there’ as an objective physical landscape but as a collective entity that gathers people’s emotions and memories, mixes them with architecture and elicits distinctive practices and ways of being. Or put another way the city is not simply architecture alone, but a curious melding of ‘flesh and stone.’”
I removed my jacket, put it back on, donned my sunglasses, took them off. I smeared sunscreen on my face. Chugged my water. Learned about my companions, all Nevada journalists tasked with writing about the place. We were making City a city simply by inhabiting it with our bodies. And I could not forget the fact of my body. I was at times too hot, too cold, wind-bitten, sunburnt. Tired. Thirsty. Dry. Aware of a soft ache in my legs, which by the end of the day, would carry me five miles. There was a porta potty hidden behind a mound at the edge of the installation, but when I had to pee, I walked out toward the soft edges of City, where concrete met sage. I spotted a few evening lilies in bloom, and quietly thanked the botanist who’d taught me to identify them. A pair of birds, which I couldn’t identify, flitted through the brush, and darted off toward the horizon. I looked at the snow melting off peaks in the Grant Range. The immensity of the valley was overwhelming. I wished I could walk farther into the brush, to escape the city for the outdoors.
In his book Basin and Range, John McPhee wrote about the region where City is located: “Supreme over all is silence. Discounting the cry of the occasional bird, the wailing of a pack of coyotes, silence — a great spatial silence — is pure in the Basin and Range. It is a soundless immensity with mountains in it. You stand, as we do now, and look up at a high mountain front, and turn your head and look 50 miles down the valley, and there is utter silence.”
A LONG TIME ago, an asteroid slammed into what was then a shallow ocean near Alamo. A tsunami upended the order of things, ripping up rocks, balling up molten limestone, fossilizing forms of ancient sea sponges and algae. Some 360 million years later, the United States Atomic Energy Commission dropped bombs on desert basins, and in St. George, Utah, farmers noticed that their sheep were burned and bleeding, or born with defects. Across the region, people started developing cancer.
A national monument designation decreed in 2015 protects the Garden Valley from oil drilling and mining, but valleys all around Nevada are littered with lithium and silver and gold claims. In Southern Nevada, a bill introduced by U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto would permit large stretches of land from Las Vegas to Primm to be filled with suburbs, straining groundwater and threatening endangered desert tortoise habitat. Why be mad at City, a writer in our group asked, when you could be mad at Starbucks?
A couple of months before I visited City, I told a friend about Heizer's Double Negative. I’d never seen it, just photos, including those of Justin Favela’s Family Fiesta, a cookout that took place in and above the land art. But I knew that Heizer had dynamited more than 200,000 tons of sandstone and rhyolite to cut a trench into Mormon Mesa, near Overton. (Mormon Mesa, I remembered, had once been the site of a planned solar installation, but Overton residents got the plan killed in 2021.) My friend couldn’t understand the point of Double Negative; why break something when you didn’t have to? When he saw photos of City, he commented that it looked like flood channels in Las Vegas. He was a practical person, a climber who worked in rockfall mitigation. His job, unlike Heizer’s, was to keep rocks in place.
I wondered what he would feel if he saw City. While I was on my own visit, he was probably hanging by ropes off the side of a collapsed slope in California, stabilizing it against future landslides. It wasn’t too dissimilar from building City, I thought.
BY THE LAST hour of our trip, I was hovering at the edges, making an inventory of creatures and plants that had quietly inched their way onto the aseptic grounds of the monument. On a path where none of us had yet walked, I saw a single footprint. It was a snag in the system. A grounds worker had forgotten to smooth it over. At Complex Two, I was delighted to see a light dusting of bird poop in a corner (apparently a raven nested nearby). This felt like the truth of a city: We can build houses and sidewalks and freeways and airports, we can dig and destroy, and we can take, but no matter how hard we try to stamp out evidence of what came before us, humans are deeply intertwined with the natural world.
The sky turned fiery pink, and back at the Chevy Tahoe, Kris made me the best chicken salad sandwich I’ve ever eaten. In a few weeks, I’d hike through a salt marsh and swim at a wild beach. Even though Las Vegas would record its hottest day ever in July, and Lake Mead was still too low, and wildfires would break out across California, New Mexico, and Arizona earlier than they usually did, and hurricane season was starting earlier, too, in May I could take solace in how wonderful it was to be alive and outside in the desert. The morning after I saw City, I woke up parched and chapped. My body was a memory of our trip to Garden Valley, even though no trace of me was left there.