Thunder Mountain Monument rises like a bizarre mirage in the middle of silence and desert, 2 hours east of Reno in the land where they say VW vans come to die.
The 80-foot petrified carcass of rusty cars and eroding statues has survived alongside Highway 80 for more than 40 years.
It’s easy to blow by this roadside monstrosity, but difficult to forget you saw it.
The man behind the Monument was a former police officer and WWII vet named Frank Van Zant who reinvented himself in his latter years. Renaming himself Chief Rolling Thunder, he moved his wife and 3 young children to the side of the highway in Imlay, NV, to spend his retirement scavenging the desert and building Thunder Mountain out of man’s trash.
He began constructing the junk-art monument in 1968 with two goals in mind: to illustrate the plight of the Native Americans and to make an ecological statement about man’s wastefulness.
Eldest son Daniel Van Zant, a man of 22 at the time, recalled in a 2008 interview that his father would work from daylight till dark to construct the monument.
“I thought he’d slipped a cog for sure. I’d say, Why do you want to do this? This is a lot of work. Most people retire and play golf, go fishing,” said Daniel , caretaker and owner of Thunder Mountain since his father’s 1989 death.
Daniel said his father had no more than a quarter of Creek ancestry but had always been passionate for Native American culture. He told some that an old medicine woman predicted he would build Thunder Mountain. To others, he said an eagle had instructed him to “build a nest” in a dream.
“He was a pretty good story-teller. I never know how much to believe. I don’t know how much he believed,” said Daniel in 2008, and admitted he didn’t initially share his father’s enthusiasm for the monument.
But many hippies did share that enthusiasm and gravitated to Thunder Mountain in the 60’s and 70’s to help with the construction. Some stayed years building the monument by day and huddled around Chief Rolling Thunder’s storytelling by night.
But by the late 80’s, Chief Rolling Thunder was battling poor health and depression. He had gone as far as he could go. January 5, 1989 he wrote a letter to Daniel before he turned a gun on himself.
After his father’s death, many encouraged Daniel to maintain the property. Despite the 5-hour commute, Daniel and his wife Margie have spent the better part of the last 20 years cleaning and repairing the property with their own blood, sweat, and tears.
“Its hard for me to believe its been 20 years since my father passed away. Its quite a milestone that I will have owned the property as long as he had owned it,” said Daniel in 2008.
And although Thunder Mountain might be in the land where VW vans come to die, nothing about this monument is dead. Instead, it’s a pulsing reminder that everything can be salvaged and anything can be saved. Every discard here has purpose in this enormous mosaic-like mystery that pulls people in off the highway everyday and sticks with them long after they go.
And like a telepathic hitchhiker, Thunder Mountain Monument has found a way to get its messages out without ever leaving I-80.
Still, spending weekends and nearly every vacation in a camper beside it might seem unnerving to some people, but Daniel said in 2008 that he enjoys the diversion from his desk job as an account executive and he appreciates his father’s messages more than ever now.
“I understand [now] what he was trying to do,” explained Daniel. “It was definitely a Holocaust. There was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Indian culture. He wanted to build something that people could be reminded.”
