In the early 2000s, California man Elmer Long turned his father’s bottles into a public two-acre ranch; today, more than 200 welded trees display over 1,000 bottles

The Mojave Desert appears to be as desolate as it gets when you drive along the former National Trails Highway between Barstow and Victorville. Then there's a bottle forest at the side of the road. On a windy day, the entire area whistles as glass in every colour hangs from welded metal trees. It appears museum-worthy, but anyone can enter.This is Elmer’s Bottle Tree Ranch in Oro Grande, California, built using bottles his father collected and left behind. Long began creating bottle trees around 2000. Today, the free, two-acre site features more than 200 trees displaying over 1,000 bottles. Arts charity SPACES calls the place filled with hundreds of welded trees adorned with bottles and miscellaneous artefacts. The story behind the ranch begins with Long’s desert boyhood and his father’s collecting.A father’s desert hoardIn the 1950s, Elmer camped in the Mojave with his father, aircraft engineer Elmer Long Sr., who loved the desert. The two collected anything that caught their eye, including bottles, and noted where each find was located. The elder Long aged and began to pass out the bottles. His son chose to rescue the remains and transferred them to his house on Route 66 near Oro Grande. The bottles, metal pipes and antiques remained in storage until Long found a way to turn them into a display.From one tree to a forestAround 2000, Long attached bottles to a wooden post to create his first bottle tree. The following morning, sunlight shining through the glass inspired him to make more. Roadside America reports that travellers stopped to photograph the display that same day. By 2002, Long was creating bottle trees full-time. Long’s first bottle tree used a wooden post, but the ranch eventually grew into a forest of more than 200 trees made from metal pipes with welded branches, according to accounts from Amusing Planet.Bottles were just the start. The ranch also features a boat filled with bottles, a tree made from a discarded missile casing, and toppers ranging from an electric guitar and a surfboard to a gumball machine. The collection combines objects recovered from roadsides and landfills with decommissioned weapons and other military hardware documented in the SPACES archive.Long was not the first person to string bottles on trees in this part of the desert. Miles Mahan, a retired funfair worker, started creating Hula Ville in 1955 on a half-acre plot outside Hesperia, featuring bottle trees, painted rhymes and recovered signs. Some Route 66 writers have suggested that Hula Ville may have inspired Long, but the connection remains unconfirmed. Hula Ville was razed in September 1997, but some of it was spared and can be seen, SPACES notes, at the California Route 66 Museum in Victorville.Keeping the ranch standingElmer Long passed away on June 22, 2019, at the age of 72 after a battle with lung cancer. The ranch was reopened in early September of that year, with his son Elliott taking command. The ranch is free to enter when its gates are open, and a wishing well on the grounds accepts donations.Elliott has been upfront about how hard that is. He wrote on the ranch’s website that time, weather, neglect and the cost of keeping a property for free are catching up quicker than he can keep up. He estimated the deferred maintenance at roughly 150 hours of work, Route 66 News said. In an update in May 2026, he noted the gates have remained open largely thanks to a site manager named Brian and praised the additional travellers expecting when Route 66 hits its centenary.Route 66 turns 100 on 11 November 2026, which makes this a fitting moment to visit. The ranch sits at 24266 National Trails Highway in Oro Grande. There are no official hours, but the gates are usually open in daylight, and on days they are shut, you can still see much of it through the fence. Elmer Long never set out to create a monument. He had his father's bottles, some pipe put away and a post to try them on. What resulted was a free roadside attraction that drivers still stop to see.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.