Elmer's Bottle Tree Ranch

Elmer Long was a lifelong Mojave Desert resident who worked for decades as a heavy-equipment operator across the high desert region — running graders, dozers, and loaders on the kind of public-works and mining projects that built and maintained the Mojave's road network through the latter half of the twentieth century. He was not a trained artist, did not consider himself an artist, and never seems to have referred to the bottle tree ranch as art during his lifetime. He called the trees "trees" and the property simply "the ranch." The folk-art designation came later from journalists, photographers, and visiting curators who recognized the installation's significance within the broader American outsider-art tradition.

The bottle trees emerged out of two specific circumstances. The first was Elmer's father's bottle collection — decades of glass bottles in every color, shape, and embossing pattern, salvaged from abandoned desert sites across the Mojave. The second was Elmer's lifelong scrap-collecting habit; he picked up interesting metal objects along desert roads, at swap meets, at estate sales, and from job sites whenever he encountered something that caught his eye. By the late 1990s the bottle collection and the scrap collection had reached a critical mass on his Oro Grande property and the welding solution presented itself almost naturally. The earliest trees were simple — a single welded steel trunk with horizontal arms ending in bottles — and the designs grew more elaborate as Elmer's confidence with the form developed.

The first trees went up along the southern fence line of the property, directly facing the National Trails Highway. Passing Route 66 travelers — there were not many in 2000, before the post-2010 Route 66 tourism revival, but there were always some — slowed, stopped, took photographs, and occasionally walked up to ask Elmer about what they were seeing. Elmer was famously welcoming. He invited visitors in, walked them through the trees, told them the stories of individual objects, and occasionally let them help unload bottles from his truck. The ranch's reputation spread through Route 66 travel guides, photography blogs, and word of mouth across the 2000s and 2010s, and by the time of Elmer's death in 2019 the ranch was receiving thousands of visitors per year and had been featured in dozens of magazine articles, books, and documentary films.

The ranch sits on a fenced gravel lot of roughly an acre and a half, with the bottle trees arranged in irregular rows that create walking lanes through the installation. Most trees follow a similar basic structure — a vertical welded-steel trunk between six and twenty feet tall, with horizontal branches at varying heights ending in bottles attached to the steel by welded collars. But within that basic form the variation is enormous. Some trees are dense forests of bottles in a single color (green, blue, brown, amber, clear); others mix colors in deliberate patterns. Some trees are topped with crowns of specific objects — old gas-pump nozzles arranged like petals, a cluster of rusted hand tools, a half-dozen antique typewriters welded into a sculpture, an old rifle barrel pointing upward, traffic signs cut into geometric shapes.

The objects that share the trees with the bottles are part of what makes the ranch genuinely interesting on repeat passes. Visitors who spend twenty minutes typically notice the bottles and the overall forest effect; visitors who spend forty-five minutes start identifying specific objects — a 1940s-era cash register, a row of old metal lunchboxes, a collection of pre-war license plates, a stack of rusted iron skillets, a cluster of antique fishing reels. Photographers often return for second visits because they realize on review of their first-visit images that they missed entire categories of objects on the initial walk through.

The hand-painted signs Elmer and his family installed across the property add interpretive context. Some signs identify the source of specific objects ("FROM THE OLD GOFFS SCHOOL HOUSE," "DAD'S LAST WELDING HELMET"). Others are simple jokes or aphorisms in Elmer's handwriting. A few are memorial markers added after his death by his family. The signs are part of why the ranch feels personal — they keep the property anchored in Elmer's specific biography and prevent it from drifting into a more generic folk-art attraction.

The Bottle Tree Ranch is one of the most photographically rewarding stops on California Route 66 and rewards thoughtful attention to light. The two consensus best times to visit for photography are early morning (roughly an hour after sunrise through about 9 a.m.) and late afternoon golden hour (roughly the last 90 minutes before sunset). Both times produce strong directional light that backlights the bottles, makes the colored glass glow, and creates long shadows through the rows. Midday light is flat and bleaches the bottles' colors — workable for documentary photography but not for the dramatic backlit images that the ranch is famous for.

The single most photographed angle is looking up at a backlit blue or green bottle tree against an open sky — the bottles glow like stained glass and the welded steel structure reads as a graphic silhouette. The second most photographed angle is a long horizontal shot down one of the rows, with multiple trees receding into the distance and the desert horizon visible behind. Wide-angle lenses (24-35mm full-frame equivalent) work well for the immersive forest effect; longer lenses (70-200mm) work well for compressing rows and isolating individual bottle clusters.

Practical photography tips: the gravel surface is uneven, so a small tripod with adjustable legs is more useful than a tall studio tripod. Wind is common in the high desert and the bottles occasionally creak audibly in stiff breezes — atmospheric for video, but you may want to weight a tripod down. Drone photography over the property is generally permitted but requires basic courtesy (don't buzz other visitors), and the aerial perspective produces some of the most striking images of the overall forest pattern. The ranch is in open desert with very little ambient light, so it's also a respectable astrophotography location after dark — though formal after-dark visits should be cleared with the family in advance.

Elmer Long died in 2019 after a long Mojave Desert life. His passing was widely covered in Route 66 publications and in the folk-art press, and there was understandable concern about whether the ranch would continue to be open to the public. The family — Elmer's sons in particular — made the decision to keep the property open and to continue maintaining the trees. The bottle trees themselves require occasional welding repair (bottles break in wind events, steel joints need touch-ups), and the family has handled this maintenance work since Elmer's death.

The family has also been deliberate about not commercializing the property aggressively. There is no formal gift shop, no admission gate, no audio tour, no scheduled hours beyond the informal dawn-to-dusk daily access. The donation box remains the property's only funding mechanism beyond family resources, and donations are explicitly described as helping with maintenance rather than as a required admission. This choice has cost some potential revenue but has preserved the ranch's authentic character — visitors who arrive expecting a polished attraction are sometimes briefly disoriented, but most quickly recognize that the unpolished quality is essential to what makes the ranch worth visiting.

The family does occasionally add new trees and new objects, and the property is therefore not strictly preserved as a frozen-in-2019 monument. The additions are made in a style consistent with Elmer's approach and using objects from his accumulated collection (he left behind a substantial backlog of unbuilt material). The property continues to evolve gradually, which is closer to what Elmer would have wanted than a static memorial would have been.

The ranch is located at 24266 National Trails Highway in Oro Grande, roughly 5 miles north of Victorville and roughly 30 miles south of Barstow. The National Trails Highway is the surviving original alignment of Route 66 between these two towns and is in respectable driving condition — two-lane blacktop, light traffic, scenic high-desert landscape. Visitors driving the modern Interstate 15 between Victorville and Barstow will need to exit and take a short detour onto the National Trails Highway to reach the ranch; the detour adds maybe fifteen minutes to a Victorville-Barstow run and is worth every minute.

Parking is along the dirt shoulder in front of the property or on a small gravel turnout adjacent to the entrance. Sedans, RVs, motorcycles, and large pickup trucks all park without issue. The property itself is at street level and the gravel surface is generally walkable, though visitors with significant mobility limitations may find the uneven ground challenging. There are no restrooms on site — plan facility stops in Victorville (5 miles south) or Barstow (30 miles north) before or after the visit.

The natural way to fit the Bottle Tree Ranch into a California Route 66 day is as a mid-morning or mid-afternoon stop between Victorville and Barstow. A common Mojave Route 66 sequence: breakfast at Emma Jean's Holland Burger Cafe in Victorville (the Brian Burger is the signature dish), drive 5 miles north to the Bottle Tree Ranch for an hour of photography, continue 30 miles north to Barstow for lunch at Idle Spurs Steakhouse and a visit to the Route 66 Mother Road Museum at Casa del Desierto, then push further into the Mojave toward Amboy and Roy's Motel & Cafe. Photographers traveling specifically for the ranch sometimes time visits for sunrise or sunset and base in Victorville the night before or after.