Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence.—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

A solstice is always coming. 

Numerous landspeed records have been set on the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover, UT since 1911. 

My first visit to the Sun Tunnels was a morning in early June. There was one man from Bainbridge Island, Washington. He and his wife had been coming to the area annually for a gathering at their friend’s ranch since the 1960s. He had never seen the Sun Tunnels. He finally saw what all the fuss was about.

About a hour away is the Golden Spike National Monument at Promotory Summit. The ceremonial 17.6-karat golden spike was driven by Leland Stanford on May 10, 1869 to join the rails of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States. The train whistles themselves are worth the visit.

The land near the sculpture is desolate and quite windy. When you pee, it is hard not to pee on yourself. There is a letting go that happens.  

The Center for Land Use Interpretation has an outpost and artist residency near Wendover. It is dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

The sculpture sits at 831 feet above sea level at 41.3035° N, 113.8638° W among the Little Pigeon Mountains in what is called the Great Basin Desert. 

Wendover Airfield was selected as the training and test center for the atomic bomb delivery group as part of Project Alberta. Nicknamed "Kingman," the site was the initial training ground for the 509th Composite Group and the 216th Army Air Force Base Unit, Special Airfield A. 

I returned two weeks later, the eve of the Summer Solstice, families had gathered. Not many people knew exactly why they had come there at this moment. They were not art people, as I had assumed there would be. They were mostly local Utah citizens discovering what “the fuss was all about.” 

At 5:50 am on June 20, 2020, during a year of pandemic, I watched the sun rise in perfect alignment with Holt’s sculpture and 120 other strangers and two friends, Michael and Catherine. 

Nancy Holt writes:SUN TUNNELS, 1973–76, is built on forty acres, which I bought in 1974 specifically as a site for the work. The land is in the Great Basin Desert in northwestern Utah, about four miles southeast of Lucin (pop. ten) and nine miles east of the Nevada border. 

*(Lucin was abandoned in the 1990s). 

Sun Tunnels marks the yearly extreme positions of the sun on the horizon—the tunnels being aligned with the angles of the rising and setting of the sun on the days of the solstices, around June 21st and December 21st. On those days the sun is centered through the tunnels, and is nearly center for about ten days before and after the solstices.

The four concrete tunnels are laid out on the desert in an open X configuration eighty-six feet long on the diagonal. Each tunnel is eighteen feet long, and has an outside diameter of nine feet and two-and-a-half inches and an inside diameter of eight feet with a wall of thickness of seven-and-a-quarter inches. A rectangle drawn around the outside of the tunnels would measure sixty-eight-and-a-half feet by fifty-three feet.

Cut through the wall in the upper half of each tunnel are holes of four different sizes—seven, eight, nine, and ten inches in diameter. Each tunnel has a different configuration of holes corresponding to stars in four different constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. The sizes of the holes vary relative to the magnitude of the stars to which they correspond. During the day, the sun shines through the holes, casting a changing pattern of pointed ellipses and circles of light on the bottom half of each tunnel. On nights when the moon is more than a quarter full, moonlight shines through the holes casting its own paler pattern. The shapes and positions of the cast light differ from hour to hour, day to day, and season to season, relative to the positions of the sun and moon in the sky.

Each tunnel weighs twenty-two tons and rests on a buried concrete foundation. Due to the density, shape, and thickness of the concrete, the temperature is fifteen to twenty degrees cooler inside the tunnels in the heat of day. There is also a considerable echo inside the tunnels.

This is Utah | Sun Tunnels | PBS | May 2021 (Filmed while I was there in May 2020. ***Note: I was interviewed:) Art Forum, April 1977 Utah Museum of Fine Arts Directions to the Sun Tunnels

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