Your destination is on the left.

Our first clue was an old sailboat looking very lost in the middle of the desert.

It was propped up on its end, sticking straight up in the air.

That used to be a knacker cat.

And it only got more surreal from there. My dad, my sister and I had driven out to Joshua Tree, a couple

hours inland of Los Angeles. We parked in front of an archway made out of car tires.

The letters of the word welcome were hand-painted where hubcaps used to be, but the letters

were out of order. I walked through the arch and into more

than a dozen busted TV sets. They were lined up and stacked on top of each other, like a vintage storefront for a business that sold broken electronics.

Behind that, my dad spotted a wave made out of a bunch of baking pans suspended in midair.

What do you think it was?

It looked like a helix.

Oh, I think it looks like a caterpillar.

There were dozens of these. I think it looks like a caterpillar.

There were dozens of these structures made out of everything from corrugated metal to bicycle wheels and bowling balls. And they were all around us, spread out over 10 acres of desert sand.

I'm Sarah Weiman and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're headed to the Mojave Desert, where over the course of 15 years, the artist Noah Purifoy built these 10 acres of

sprawling and intricate sculptures. You built them out of trash. Or at least that's what it might look like at first glance. But to get the

full picture you have to know Noah, who he was, his mission, and his legacy. After this. I came to know a purifoy's outdoor art museum with a little bit of context. I knew that Noah was what's called

an assemblage artist, meaning he made sculptures out of discarded objects. I knew

that back in the 1960s and 70s he was a pioneer and a leader in the

art community in Los Angeles. I knew that before that he'd been a social worker

...