Visit the Seven Magic Mountains (Las Vegas, NV)

Check out a picture gallery of Seven Magic Mountains on the Full Metal Traveler website and subscribe to the FMT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Ten miles south of Las Vegas, Nevada, seven towers cut through the desert sky.  They stand taller than one might think if you’re simply driving by on Interstate 15, on your way to lose your hard earned money in a gilded casino. At first glance they don’t seem that impressive from far away. It’s easy to dismiss them. But their brilliant and bold colors stand in stark contrast to the mountain ranges, desert and dry lake backdrop that surround them.  According to the creator, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, this location is the physical and symbolic halfway point between the natural and the artificial.  The natural being the desert landscape. The artificial, of course, being the glitz and glamour of the casino lights as well as the constant traffic buzzing between Los Angeles and Sin City. It’s hard to argue the point.  The boulders themselves teeter on top of one another, seemingly about to tip over at any moment. They rise thirty to thirty-five feet in the air, breathlessly creating an aura of the supernatural around them. Calling back to our primitive natures when we could neither understand nor fathom how man or nature could create something so big. The locally-sourced lime boulders were cut with precision, painted and stacked in just a few months time, opening in 2016.  In this short amount of time they have become a hot spot for tourists, Instagrammable photo seekers, and curious locals all the same.  Each one taking something different with them once they leave.  The Swiss have a proverb that loosely translates to this: “Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard.”  In this place, these towers, these Seven Magic Mountains, speak the loudest, reminding us, albeit for a brief moment that we are both part of the natural world and artificially molded by the noise and chaos we create in it.