Seven Magic Mountains

This guide to Seven Magic Mountains south of the Las Vegas Strip follows Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone from a stone-stacking project in Manhattan to this stretch of the Ivanpah Valley, where he set his neon-painted boulder towers deliberately between real mountains and the highway traffic streaming past. You'll hear how workers quarried and stacked thirty-three limestone boulders through the winter, then coated them in glowing color, and why Rondinone chose this exact spot on the line between the natural and the artificial. It's a good stop for wondering how a temporary art project became one of the desert's most photographed landmarks.