The closed and abandoned Arne’s Royal Hawaiian Motel was a welcome oasis for overheated travelers passing through the Gateway to Death Valley in Baker, CA.

Hold the Pineapple

Arne’s Royal Hawaiian Motel opened in 1957, at the height of the post-war South Seas boom. The motel is located in the tiny town of Baker (pop. 835), conveniently close to the intersection of I-15 and State Route 127 (Death Valley Road).

Reasonable Bates er, Rates

At roughly the halfway point between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the 43-room motel hoped to lure road-going travelers in need of an overnight sleep stop. As well, tourists visiting infamously hot & dry Death Valley just to the north no doubt appreciated a dip in the motel’s refreshingly cool, guests-only, outdoor swimming pool.

Baking In Baker

Baker wasn’t just a well-placed rest stop, however. The so-called “Gateway to Death Valley” also boasted The World’s Tallest Thermometer. Standing 134 feet tall, the electrically-powered monument commemorates the world’s record highest temperature of 134°F (56.7°C), recorded at nearby Furnace Creek on July 10th, 1913.

Uncool Cooler

On the downside, Baker is also home to a shuttered, 223-bed, for-profit prison formerly operated by Cornell Corrections. The prison’s checkered history includes occasional escapes by inmates (twice in 1995 and another two in 1997) and a major riot in December of 2003 that forced a temporary closure. The leaky slammer closed for good in late 2009, allowing nervous Bakerites (and motel room-renters) to breathe a bit easier.

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Creepy Tiki Abandoned Arnes Royal Hawaiian Motel

Painted pump jacks with plenty of personality put the “pet” into petroleum at the venerable and vanishing Iron Zoo in and around Coalinga, California.

Formerly known as “Coaling Station A”, the town of Coalinga in Fresno County hitched its wagon to a different type of fossil fuel once the Coalinga Oil Field was discovered in the late 1880s. The subsequent oil boom peaked in the 1910s with pump jacks and steam injectors gradually replacing derricks. By the late 1960s one couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a pump jack… sparking a brainstorm in one Coalinga-area resident who wondered how the ubiquitous “nodding donkeys” could work for the greater good. Or at least, for her greater good.

Jean Dakessian Jones and her husband owned a motel that – due to the recent opening of Interstate 5 – was vacant more often than not. Jones knew she had to find some way to attract more traffic (literally) to their motel. Inspiration struck in the form of the pump jacks, whose form & function lent itself to artistic modification. “I had never seen oil pumps like those,” recounted Jones, “and my imagination saw them as all kinds of creatures. I thought that if people came off the freeway they would see a painted pump, go a little farther to see the next one, and on and on until they made it to Coalinga and saw our wonderful and inviting motor lodge. It worked!” And with that, the “Iron Zoo” was born.

Many of Jones’ painted pump jacks are off the beaten path with the most-photographed example – the zebra – being the most accessible. The images above were snapped by Flickr members Emerald Wu (whiteskylight) and 1Flatworld in 2013 and 2007, respectively. Note the ominous confluence of warning signs… it may be smelly but this is definitely not your average zoo!

Pumpjack Pennywise

To say the Iron Zoo had humble beginnings would be an understatement – it started with a single painted pump jack. Of course, the pump jacks weren’t Jones’ property and trespassing laws are rigorously enforced both for the safety of the public and to protect the companies from legal liability. Flickr member David Cohen (zampano!!!) captured this somewhat disturbing clown (aren’t ALL clowns somewhat disturbing?) in December of 2007.

Refuel Refugees

Jones played by the rules and in 1971 she contacted Marshall Newkirk, site manager for Shell Oil in Coalinga. To her surprise and delight, she found an ally in Newkirk. “After I painted the first one,” explained Jones, “he ran it by the head office and they gave me the green light to continue.”

Not only did Shell approve of Jones’ plan, they even chipped in to cover the cost of the paint – no small expense considering the company owned 23 pump jacks. By mid-1973, Jones had painted all of Shell’s pump jacks… and boy, were her arms tired. Flickr member Arlette captured the above bobbing goat in September of 2009.

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Petroleum Pets Coalingas Vanishing Iron Zoo

It’s the third-largest city in California by land area but most people (including many in CA) have never even heard of this mostly-empty desert oasis, home to around 15,000 people. It’s not quite a city, but not quite a ghost town either.

Visiting the area is a bit surreal – roads running through its 200 square miles connect nothing to nothing in the hot Mojave, in some cases following straight lines and in others wrapping to form cul-de-sacs.

Some roads are paved, but most aren’t. In places, nature has started to reclaim the dirty gravel strips with hearty desert plants growing right up through streets.

Photographer Noritaka Minami recently took a trip in a helicopter to photograph the strange sprawling semi-ghost town, which are on display at On Freedom, an exhibition at Aperture for another month.

The place was a mid-century vision of a real estate developer named Nathan Mendelshon who purchased over 80,000 acres, imagining California City as a fresh metropolis for a growing state.

Some parcels were resold but never developed — others were bought and remain in use, mainly for people working at a nearby military base or prison.

The few houses that do exist seem almost stranger than the framework of roads around them, neatly fenced in a neighborhood of empty plots.

More from Minami: “This project focuses on California City, a master planned community in the Mojave Desert conceived by sociologist turned real estate developer Nathan K. Mendelsohn in 1958. California City was envisioned as the next major metropolis in California in response to the population and economic growths after World War II. This development was based on the belief that even in a harsh desert landscape, mankind had the freedom and power to produce a built environment that provided all of the essential needs for a prosperous modern life.”

In his series of black-and-white images, “aerial photography is used to document the scale of the vision Mendelsohn proposed in the desert and question whether this ‘wonderland’ could have even been sustainable in this environment. Despite having the foundation for a city in place, there are no indications that this city will ever be realized in the future.” In the end, half-built may be an overstatement — in reality, the place is more like a skeletal outline of a city, punctuated (like a normal rural landscape) by pockets of development and clusters of community.

For just a split-second as you zoom by in your vehicle, you’ll catch the perfect alignment of 2D imagery on a billboard and the real, three-dimensional mountains in the background, eliminating advertising to refocus your attention on what’s really important. Set along Gene Autry Trail in California as part of Desert X, an outdoor exhibition of site-specific art installed across the Coachella Valley, the billboard series by Jennifer Bolande demonstrates an unusual form of camouflage.

The installation is particularly effective for the close placement of the billboards, which are glimpsed in quick succession. Real and artificial environments blend together in an illusion that’s particularly effective on a bright, sunny afternoon when the sky is at its bluest. The work is specifically made to be experienced from a passing car, drawing inspiration from an old Burma Shave ad that used sequential placement to create a message that could only be read from a moving vehicle.

‘Visible Distance/Second Sight’ is particularly effective in this desert environment, where most structures are low-lying and there are no towering trees. This setting ordinarily makes billboards pop out from the landscape even more than they would in a city.

Other striking installations in the Desert X series include ‘The Circle of Land and Sky’ by Phillip K. Smith III, a composition of 300 geometric reflectors angled at 10 degrees to engage with the surrounding Sonoran Desert, and ‘Curves and Zigzags’ by Claudia Comte, a series of scuptural freestanding walls.

All photos by Lance Gerber Studio

Designed to address the pervasive drought and long-term water problems of the West Coast, The Pipe is an offshore water purification plant that combines sustainable energy, public works and experiential architecture.

A finalist of the 2016 Land Art Generator Initiative design competition, focused on projects around the Santa Monica Pier, the solar-powered Pipe filters brine and channels drinking water to the adjacent city. Saltwater is returned to the Pacific Ocean. Khalini Engineers, a Canadian company, employed an electromagnetic desalination system for their entry, driven by energy from the sun (10,00 MWh/year). With that power and overall system capacity, the Pipe could produce 1.5 billion gallons of fresh potable water annually.

“The sustainable infrastructure that is required to meet California’s development goals and growing population will have a profound influence on the landscape, ” say Rob Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, co-founders of the Land Art Generator Initiative. “The Paris Climate Accord from COP 21 has united the world around a goal … which will require a massive investment in clean energy infrastructure.”

“Above, solar panels provide power to pump seawater through an electromagnetic filtration process below the pool deck,” writes the design team, “quietly providing the salt bath with its healing water and the city with clean drinking water. The Pipe represents a change in the future of water.”

“What results are two products: pure drinkable water that is directed into the city’s primary water piping grid, and clear water with twelve percent salinity. The drinking water is piped to shore, while the salt water supplies the thermal baths before it is redirected back to the ocean through a smart release system, mitigating most of the usual problems associated with returning brine water to the sea.” In addition to its primary functions, The Pipe also represents an aesthetically pleasing offshore object that would change viewer’s conceptions of near-coastal rigs, conventionally associated with oil production.