Thunder Mountain Monument - Imlay, Nevada

Thunder Mountain Monument - Imlay, Nevada

Interstate 80 near Imlay offers you an opportunity to see what a huge conglomeration of quirky sculptures can become when made from things that most people would see a junk.  Old cars, bottles, railroad ties, machinery, wheels and a bucket load of concrete have become a sculpture created by a man named Frank Van Zant.  He felt it was a tribute to the Native American plight.  It was begun in 1967 and worked on it for over two decades.

The story of Van Zant and his sculpture starts with his meeting an old medicine woman who told him "In the final days, there shall rise up a place called Thunder Mountain."  She said that only those who lived at Thunder Mountain would survive the apocalypse.  Van Zant, who had some Creek Indian heritage, came from Oklahoma.  It was after his talk with the medicine woman that he changed his name to Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder.  He moved his family to the desert and began to build the monument.  Fortunately for him there was a junkyard nearby where he could obtain his treasures for building such as farm equipment, typewriters, car hoods and wheels.

When he was alive he and his family lived in a three story house built of bottles and concrete.  The roof had spires and pretzels of painted concrete sticking out of it in all directions, culminating in a dome skeleton.  The windows were automobile windshields.

Through the years he and his friends erected several unusual buildings from roadside junk and boards and metal from abandoned buildings.  With the enormous quantities of concrete used he figured his home would stand for a thousand years.  Elsewhere on the property are concrete totem poles, rusted refrigerator doors serving as billboards for political statements, baby doll heads stuck on tree branches and blue glass pole insulators everywhere.

"Chief Thunder" continued his work on the site until 1989 at the age of 69 when he committed suicide, some say it's because he had completed his masterpiece.

Because the site is now vacant there are no tour guides to take you around.  The Chief's son is trying to fix the place back up since it had fallen into some disrepair since his death.  When you visit the site, there is a big metal box at the beginning of the walkway that takes you on a tour through the grounds, please leave a donation to help fix this unique site up.

Location: Between Winnemucca and Lovelock off Interstate 80, about 120 miles east of Reno.