Thunder Mountain Park

This is surely the most bizarre out of all the monuments we have written about. Way out in the Nevada desert, nearest to Imlay, is a monument/sculpture that wasn’t constructed from traditional materials. You’ll see random pieces of machinery, concrete, vehicle parts, glass bottles, wheels, and a bunch of other hard-to-identify scraps combined to form a strange symbolic sculpture. The Monument was constructed by a man named Frank Van Zant and it took him over twenty years to complete the piece, beginning in 1967. He wanted it to be a symbol of the Native American plight.

The idea for this monument came about one day when Zant came across an old medicine woman who told him of a place called Thunder Mountain. After this meeting Zant changed his name to Chief Rolling Thunder Mountain and moved to the desert to build his Thunder Mountain Monument. He finished in the year 1989 at age 69, and subsequently committed suicide.

Thunder Mountain has since been designated a Nevada State Historic Site and a National Monument, but it has suffered from neglect and vandalism. Chief Rolling Thunder Mountain’s son Daniel Van Zant is trying to protect the Monument and several structures on the land site.

Unlike some of the other National Monuments, there are no park rangers or tour guides at the site.  You can however, leave a donation for repairs to the site when you visit.

Source: Legends of America