Cabazon Dinosaurs
— — the brontosaurus you can see from the freeway.
Not only on a wall.
“Two enormous concrete dinosaurs standing in the desert wind west of Palm Springs, built one steel rib at a time by a roadside sculptor who wanted travellers to pull off and stay a while. Dinny, the long-necked one, is 150 feet from nose to tail. Mr. Rex came later, 65 feet tall and still glaring east toward Banning. They have been there long enough to feel like landscape.
Cabazon Dinosaurs, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Cabazon Dinosaurs stand alongside Interstate 10 in Cabazon, California, an unincorporated community in Riverside County at the mouth of the San Gorgonio Pass between the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains. The site is a privately owned roadside attraction roughly 20 miles west of Palm Springs and 90 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Two oversized concrete-and-steel dinosaurs stand on the property: Dinny, a 150-foot-long Apatosaurus, and Mr. Rex, a 65-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex. The land sits at about 1,800 feet of elevation in the windy gap of the pass.
Claude K. Bell, a former portrait sculptor at Knott's Berry Farm, began building Dinny in 1964 to draw drivers off Highway 10 and into the Wheel Inn diner he ran at the site. Dinny took eleven years and roughly $300,000 of Bell's own money to complete; it opened to visitors in 1975. Mr. Rex was completed in 1986, the year Bell died. The figures appeared in the 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure, which fixed them in the American roadside imagination. The Wheel Inn diner closed in 2013.
The site is open daily and free to view from the parking lot, which is the way most travellers experience it: a quick stop off Interstate 10 between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. A gift shop occupies the belly of Dinny, reached by a stairway in the rear leg. A separate ticketed dinosaur garden behind the figures includes about fifty smaller sculptures and is run as a creationist museum by the current owners, who acquired the property in the 1990s. The wind through the San Gorgonio Pass is constant; expect it.