Michael Heizer, City (1970 - 2022)
Lincoln County, Nevada
September, 2025
Background
City is by American artist Michael Heizer, located in rural Lincoln County, Nevada. Spanning roughly 1.5 miles long by half a mile wide (about 2 km × 0.8 km), it is widely regarded as the largest contemporary artwork ever built. Begun in 1972, the project took five decades and an estimated $40 million to complete. Heizer designed City as a kind of modern ritual complex, a hybrid of ancient monumental forms and minimalist, industrial era construction. Composed of earth, rock, concrete, and local materials he shaped directly on site, the work consists of massive mounds, depressions, concrete volumes, long flat corridors, and towering elements (some as tall as 80 feet). The project required massive logistical effort, moving millions of tons of earth, gravel, and concrete.
It’s hard to explain, so here is an aerial image of the site. You can see it in the bottom left, going diagonally, with a support warehouse next to it, with equipment, and some irrigated land as well.
It opened for carefully limited public visitation in September 2022. Managed by the nonprofit Triple Aught Foundation, public access to City continues to be extremely limited: visitors must reserve well in advance, and only 6 to 12 people allowed on-site each day they allow visitors.
This interactive article by the New York Times does the best background and visualization for you to best understand what it is. I highly recommend you follow the link, and simply enjoy the drone footage.
Also, here’s a Timothee Chalamet photo shoot by Annie Leibowitz for some more photos of City, they had done this just a couple months before we were there (all cards on the table, it’s only okay, and doesn’t do City enough justice).
Travel
First you’ll drive to the Triple Aught Foundation office. It’s about 90 minutes from Las Vegas. There is no public transportation, so you have to rent a car to do this trip. Make sure to get off of I-15 at Exit 64 otherwise it’s a 25 minute detour to the next exit to legally turn around at is almost 12 miles away. There are some breaks in the median on your left if you make this mistake (like we did) to save some time and get back on track. Please be safe, technically it’s illegal.
Their office has plenty of parking, but the small town doesn’t have much in it other than a gas station / convenient store. Don’t expect many food options. The Triple Aught Foundation office has a bathroom and some bottled drinks / packaged snacks for you to take with you. Once everyone has arrived or it’s the scheduled time to leave, you will all pack into an SUV, and they’ll drive you to City. The group is six people, so it’s a full vehicle. Google says it should take 140 minutes, but they do it in around 100 minutes. The second half is on a dirt road, so it is definitely a bumpy ride.
Now unfortunately I was racing through the booking platform too quickly to take screenshots, perhaps if I get in for 2026, I’ll go slower and take some screenshots to share with people. But I was worried about it selling out, so I was focused on getting a reservation more than the blog post. Here’s my advice:
Have the website open and get ready to refresh the page and click through. Basically at January 12:01 PM EST on January 2nd the website will be updated and you have to find the hyperlink to the booking page. They hosted it in 2025 on Give Butter.
Have a credit card ready. The price of a visit is $150/adult, $100/student, and is free (but with reservations still required) for residents of Lincoln, Nye, and White Pine, Nevada, counties; Nevada students and educators; active military and veterans; and indigenous peoples.
Preselect some dates that you can go straight to when you’re in the platform. The window is basically early May to end of November. To be safe, we picked a few September dates that we knew we would be free. Visitation is only on certain days, though it fluctuates. Generally assume Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays are available.
Figure out if you want to do a morning visit and afternoon/evening visit. We didn’t know there were options, and on certain days there aren’t, but just something to be aware of in case you care. We did the afternoon session (I believe it’s listed as sunset, even though we didn’t get to see sunset at City).
Be quick and decisive. I was got my receipt at 12:06 pm, so within 5 minutes after it opened I was done. By the end things were starting to sell out, so you have to be swift at it, so make your decisions fast.
If you’re coming into this later, there will be a waitlist available. You can fill out a form and figure it out.
As for the actual visit. You’ll drive to the Triple Aught Foundation office, and then be shuttled to the artwork. You’ll have around 3 hours to wander around. You should bring water, food, and sunscreen. There is a portable toilet nearby, assumably in the maintenance / warehouse area, but I didn’t see it. No photos are allowed, which is fine, since a photo doesn’t do it justice anyway.
Below are some of the FAQs, rules and regulations, information packs, and a sample schedule.
Basic Terms
FAQ Page One
FAQ Page Two
Photo Policy
Preparation Sheet
Schedule
Experience
So, on January 2nd, 2025 I was on the Triple Aught Website at noon and had checked out with 2 tickets for Constitution Day six minutes later. I paid $309.27 for the two of us.
Other travel costs were:
My round trip direct flight was $298.86 from Newark, NJ to Las Vegas, NV in September, 2025.
The car rental was $70 for the day
Fuel was $25.88
Lunch, snacks, and drinks were about $50
Airbnb was $108.30 a night
All in the total cost for two people it was about $1,250-$1,500.
I coupled this trip with a biannual Vegas trip I do with some friends. I spent the weekend with them, doing classic Vegas things like Battle Bots (which was weirdly far more fun than I thought it would be), gambling (somehow I didn’t lose any money this time), and a night out at the club (Chainsmokers at XS). Our room had a view of The Sphere, which I desperately want to go to, but I refuse to pay those sky high prices to see a bastardized version of Wizard of Oz.
Then spent a couple days on my own working remote at an affordable, comfortable, and safe Airbnb off the strip. It had an icy pool that was nice to wade around in and read. It’s walking distance to the Palms Casino, which I really enjoyed (won a couple hundred playing craps there with some locals) and had a terrifying solo cinema experience watching Weapons entirely by myself (an employee walked in halfway through the movie and absolutely startled me). Also within walking distance was a requisite AYCE binge at Umiya by myself, where I ate 60 rolls in 60 minutes. Quality was surprisingly good and service was really nice. I would go back. A quick Uber jaunt up to Chinatown was enjoyable too for some incredible soup and dumplings tucked away in a grocery store. I also started watching Hacks finally, apropos since it is set in Vegas mostly.
Anyway, I’m getting distracted. I picked up the car and Mattos from the airport late Tuesday night. And we worked a half day from the Airbnb and hit the road at around 11. We swung by a Del Taco to eat lunch and ordered big to pocket a bunch of the extras for snacks while we were at City. We drove up to the Triple Aught offices in Alamo, with a slight detour because I missed an exit. We were last to arrive, but had still technically gotten there early.
Our group of six included another couple (similar art girlie and her partner) and two older athletic hiking pals. I forget our driver / host’s name, but she was very friendly and easygoing. A lengthy and bumpy ride there (which I took as a quick opportunity to nap), with a couple of quick photo opportunity spots, and we finally arrived at City.
We arrived at City at 3:11 and were told to meet back up at the car at 6:15. After a brief introduction giving us the rules of the visit (standard stuff, no pictures, no trash, stay on the designated trails, no stealing, etc.), the three couples split up. We went north (to the right) to start. Throughout the day we would see the others in the distance and would wave, but generally everyone stayed to themselves. The place is pretty vast to not have to interact with each other or even hear each other. Quite contrary to one of the staples of being in a city, It’s incredibly quiet in City. Just the wind, bugs, footsteps and your own voices. Mattos poignantly said, “It’s like our ears are desperately trying to pull sound in.”
City, for all of its effort, is at its most basic form, a giant zen garden. It has vibes of an otherworldly Dune-esque civilization or more amusingly, a very expensive go-kart track. There is much more elevation change than I thought, and both the higher ridges and lower bowls are beautiful to wander through. The random surprise was a pair of fighter jets doing dogfighting drills. It was actually incredible to see, I’ve never been to an airshow or seen planes move that fast and doing maneuvers, it’s actually mind boggling to witness. The picture at the top is of those two planes as they flew by a second time and I was prepared for them.
Other than the bugs we saw some small lizards and toads, and some birds of prey. Our guide said she sometimes finds evidence of snakes, but we didn’t see any. They also told us that there is an 8-12 person team through the week and as few as 6 on the weekend. The maintenance team rerakes and clean it up after each visit so each visiting group has a fresh experience. Someone asked if any celebrities had ever been. Apparently the Wilson brothers just showed up with regular tickets one day, but Timothee Chalamet and Annie Leibovitz did that sanctioned photo shoot a couple months before us and they shut down tours for a few days to do so.
It’s easy to criticize it for being an unnecessary waste of money. There were moments of feeling a pang of guilt at the amount of money we had spent, and our privilege to do so, just to walk in a curated park landscape in the desert. I generally believe that parks should be free and accessible, and I suppose there are lots of options in areas and land to hike more accessibly to the residents of Las Vegas, but it still felt weird to be in this incredibly private and meticulously kept and maintained walking area. This felt pricier than Lightning Field where we had accommodation for the evening and food.
Here’s a little review map of some of the highlights that we enjoyed. Also, the red diamond stars are where we sat for lengthier periods and ate tacos / quesadillas. Particularly at the dead end of the two ridges near the ziggurats and at the entrance of the south east segment with the optical illusion “T”.
Here is our advice for any visitors:
Go off in a direction that no one else is headed in. That said, if you’re in the afternoon slot, I would suggest going north first because the shadows will start covering the ziggarauts and in my opinion lessen the experience. But I enjoy sitting and literally watching the shadows grow, envelop, and change the relationships between the objects.
Give yourself time to walk through everything. It’s hard to pace yourself, but we ended up not seeing the entirety of the property because we ran out of time. I wouldn’t suggest rushing at all. It’s best enjoyed slowly and with breaks to just sit and admire the vista. We missed two sections in particular in the southeast portion because we ran out of time / energy, but in hindsight, we may have missed out. Guess we’ll have to go back!
Bring water, it’s three hours of walking around in the sun. You’ll want water.
Bring sunscreen and sun protecting clothing / accessories. There’s almost zero shade and you will get roasted if you do not prepare.
Bring food. We brought Del Taco, and wished we had brought more, and maybe some fun beverages or basically a full picnic. It’s a surreal place to sit and enjoy. The weather was quite comfortable other than the brutal sun.
Don’t worry, the above photo was taken looking away from City.
Michael Heizer is getting quite old and doesn’t return to City often since it is so remote and his health is waning. However, the future plans of City seem to be set up already.
In 2015, President Obama designated the area surrounding City as the Basin and Range National Monument. This will prevent any future mining, oil drilling, or development (like a previously proposed nuclear waste railway) from encroaching on the site. While the Bureau of Land Management manages the monument, the Triple Aught Foundation will continue to maintain ownership of the private land where City actually sits. Triple Aught will retain the majority of shares with minority shares going to at least four other museums, who will basically be the board and continue the governance of the artwork. LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art, NYC), Glenstone Museum (Potomac, MD), and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR). The foundation has also already established a $30 million endowment to cover the roughly $1.3 million in annual costs required for maintenance, security, and the visitor shuttle program. Access will likely remain at the low level.
I’ve always liked the following quote too:
“Heizer has said that he chose the area because land was cheap and available. “I’d have built this thing in New Jersey if it had been possible,” he told New York Times reporter Michael Kimmelman, in 1999.””
Summary
This is a truly expensive stroll in a curated desert. It’s incredibly cool, but I would only suggest it for seasoned land art fans who already know they enjoy this before spending the money and time to commit to experiencing this one. I loved it, and I will probably go again someday. I’ll make sure to cover everything I didn’t get to see the first time, and bring a more ridiculous food and drink spread to enjoy on the premises.
Sources
https://www.tripleaughtfoundation.org/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/19/arts/design/michael-heizer-city.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/29/michael-heizers-city
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/michael-heizers-city-2564168
https://form.jotform.com/243586041912153
https://nationalartsprogram.org/news/michael-heizers-city-explained-why-world-has-its-eyes-one-biggest-artworks-all-time
https://www.vogue.com/article/timothee-chalamet-december-cover-2025-interview