The International Car Forest of the Last Church is a rural Nevada piece of outsider art created from the collaboration of two people, Mark Rippie and Chad Sorg. The Car Forest was built after Sorg relocated to the small town of Goldfield to help Rippie bring to fruition his vision of setting the world record for having the most upturned cars as part of an art piece - a record that previously belonged to Alliance, Nebraska's Carhenge monument.
Presently the International Car Forest is made up of around three dozen cars - old sedans, vans, limos, delivery trucks and school busses - buried nose-first into the ground, stacked on top of each other, or hollowed out and set on the ground with wooden stages or dirt tunnels surrounding them.
It was the original artists' intentions for the site to act as a blank canvas for other artists to contribute to, and the old vehicles tend to be covered in graffiti of varying degrees of quality.
Desert dirt roads traverse the area surrounding the cars, including the land through the cars themselves. It is possible to walk throughout the cars in only a few minutes, and because the roads can become extremely muddy and rutted, it may be best to park at the fringes of the cars and walk into the "forest."
There is no cost, there are no amenities, and there is not even any informational signage. The Car Forest is truly just a strange manmade monument in the middle of the Nevada desert. It is interesting to see, and it is definitely worth a stop in this otherwise remote outpost of the state.
