The Lost Desert Libraries of Chinguetti

The sands of the Sahara have all but swallowed Chinguetti, a near ghost town found at the end of a harsh desert road in Mauritania, West Africa. Its majority of abandoned houses are open to the elements, lost to the dunes of a desert aggressively expanding southward at a rate of 30 miles per year.…

Who wants to Help Build the Largest Art Car in Burning Man History?

Who wouldn’t want to ride into America’s largest occult festival on the biggest, baddest float in town? Better yet, what if you could say you helped build it? This week in completely average volunteer recruitment news, a non-profit organisation is calling for volunteers to come and join them in the Mojave Desert to help create the largest art car in…

Camping like an Alien

When NASA tests habitation on Mars, they do it at a station in the Mojave Desert. This is a landscape that was chosen to be most representative of another planet and it’s also where Andrea Zettler, American sculptor, installation artist, and investigator of social practice, set up her sci-fi campsite. Lead Image (c) Rich Combs One of Andrea’s…

Conscience Letters from the Cursed Thieves of Triassic Park

In the archives of a small museum in the middle of nowhere, there are piles and piles of letters from remorseful senders dating as far back as 1938. These letters were accompanied in the mail by returned pieces of petrified wood, stolen from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Believing they are cursed and condemned by the karma of ancient…

Inside the Castle in the Middle of the Death Valley Desert

On my first California road trip a few years ago, one of our stops I was looking forward to the most was Death Valley’s mysterious Scotty’s Castle, a sprawling Spanish style manor built in the middle of nowhere in the roaring twenties. We were dangerously low on gas but determined to find this isolated oasis, and to my…

Kayaking (and fishing) in the Death Valley Desert

If someone had told me I could go kayaking in Death Valley as we drove through that barren desert one summer; the merciless August sun beating down on the tarmac ahead, I would have assumed they were starting to see a mirage. Boating in the desert?Strange things can happen in such an otherworldly place… Today this National…

Rare Kodachromes of 1950s Hot Rods to Send your Heart Racing

Motorcar racing has taken place at the Bonneville salt flats in Utah since 1914, but for three years between 1953 and 1955, one die-hard fan attended the races to capture the surreal scenes like never before– in brilliant Kodachrome colour. Don Palmer only published a few of the photos and most of his snaps have sat…

Unfinished Hotel Ruins of the Egyptian Desert

In the heart of the Egyptian Sinai desert, concrete carcasses are rising from the sand. Sultan’s Palace, Pharoah’s Resort, Coral Beach; these are the dreamt up names given to the abandoned hotels by the German duo of photographers that captured them in their unfinished limbo, Stefanie Zoche and the late Sabine Haubitz. I’m new to the…

America’s Prehistoric High Rise Apartment Complex

They call it the Montezuma Castle, but the 90ft high monument should never have been named that. The thing is, the Aztec emperor who the ruins were named after, Montezuma, mistakenly believed to have been connected to their construction, was not even born until the cliff dwellings had already been abandoned for several decades. The European-Americans who…

For Sale: The Perfect Bond Villain’s Lair Atop a Desert Volcano

Dr. No’s luxurious mountain lair was of course blown to smithereens by Bond before it could ever go on the market, but should the supervillain have somehow escaped 007, I imagine we would likely find him hiding away in a place that looks exactly like this… What do you look for when you’re house hunting? A great view,…