I woke up with a fever and a long car ride ahead of me.

I piled into the car with two acquaintances and lots of bags to head north to San Francisco from the Pioneer Town/Joshua Tree area.

In a daze in the back seat I watched as the mysterious desert landscape rolled by. "It's like purple mountains majesty and shit," my traveling companion breathed.

Yep. Fell back asleep.

I woke up to my car mates arguing about where we were. Always a bad sign on a road trip.

As we barreled down route 66 the driver worried we would end up in Arizona.

Then we saw this place:

There certainly wasn't a welcome sign, so we didn't know if we were trespassing on some wacko's land or if this was an art installation that the owner wanted people to explore.

We decided to explore anyway.

We found out more about the bottle yard when we got home. "Bottle Tree Ranch" belongs to an artist named Elmer Long.
As a child Long took many trips with his dad to the desert combing the areas for refuse from bygone days.
The dad kept extensive notes of what they found details about the bottles and their locations.

Elmer Long has built more than 200 bottle trees on his property - welded together from thousands of insulators, lengths of pipe,
cement fixings, scrap metal, antique bottles and various doodads.

He began making his bottle trees in 2000.