Mormon Mesa 2.0

​Great views of the Virgin River and Mountains, the "Double Negative" Earthwork and a fun powerline road.

This is an easy trail from Overton north to I-15 a few miles south of Mesquite.  It can be used to return to Mesquite after running the Logandale Trails.

We ran from south to north and have described the road in that direction.

There is a GPS - gpx track file at the bottom of the page.

Mormon Mesa and Mountains

Leave Overton and travel a wide gravel road up onto Mormon Mesa.  Continue on this wide road across the mesa until coming to the rim of Virgin River Canyon.  Turn left on a lesser road and follow along the edge of the rim

Leaving Overton

Virgin Mountains

There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.  -Michael Heizer

Double Negative is Michael Heizer's first prominent earthwork. It consists of two trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70.

The trenches line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide). A reported 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, was displaced in the construction of the trenches.

Double Negative was among the first "earthworks" -- artworks that use as their canvas or medium the earth itself. In keeping with the mission of modern art, Double Negative blurs the distinction between sculpture ("art") and normal objects such as rocks ("not art"), and encourage viewers to consider how the earth relates to art. The sheer size of Double Negative also invites contemplation of the scale of art, and the relation of the viewer the earth and to art itself. How does art change when it can't fit in a museum? How does one observe an artwork that's a quarter-mile long?   See website for more

Perhaps this is where the artist stayed during construction.

Double Negative

One man's castle

The road follows a powerline for the last half of the trip.  It is a fairly good road but gets tiresome by the end.

Down into Halfway Wash

Crossing one of many washes

Page updated 2018.

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