Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Salt Lake City
Weird outdoor and roadside things to do in Salt Lake City — 5 of them, from Gilgal Sculpture Garden, Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels. Folk-art environments, unexplained monuments and roadside oddities worth pulling over for, all outdoors and mostly free. They spread across Central City, Salt Lake City, Rozel Point, Box Elder County (Great Salt Lake), Near Lucin, Box Elder County (west desert, near Nevada line), Jordan Park, Poplar Grove, Salt Lake City and 1 more area, so two or three can make a whole afternoon. 3 of them cost nothing. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Gilgal Sculpture Garden
Tucked behind houses and a strip of businesses, this quarter-acre lot is where LDS bishop and stonemason Thomas Battersby Child Jr. spent 18 years (until his death in 1963) carving a sphinx with Joseph Smith's face, a sacrificial altar, and a shrine to his wife Bertha out of raw stone and industrial slag.
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Spiral Jetty
In 1970 Robert Smithson bulldozed 6,500 tons of black basalt into a 1,500-foot counterclockwise coil jutting into the lake, then it sat submerged and invisible for over two decades before drought re-exposed it — today it appears salt-crusted white or half a mile from shore depending entirely on how full the Great Salt Lake happens to be that month.
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Sun Tunnels
Nancy Holt sank four 18-foot-long, 9-foot-diameter concrete culverts into open desert in 1976 and drilled holes through their walls in the pattern of four constellations, aiming the tunnels so the rising and setting sun frames perfectly inside on the summer and winter solstices — no fence, no visitor center, no cell service, just empty land in every direction.
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International Peace Gardens
Twenty-eight nations were each handed a plot along the Jordan River since 1939 and told to build whatever felt most like home: a 50-foot fiberglass Matterhorn replica, stone lions from China, three lanterns shipped over with help from General MacArthur from Japan's Imperial Palace, and one of only four authorized replicas anywhere of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue.
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McCune Mansion
Copper-and-railroad magnate Alfred McCune's 21-room 1901 Victorian later ran for decades as an LDS-affiliated music school, and the staff who worked receptions there afterward describe an organ that plays with no one at the bench, furniture that shifts on its own, and a caped figure that shows up specifically around Christmas parties.
Weird outdoor & roadside things to do in Salt Lake City — FAQ
Which weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Salt Lake City are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Gilgal Sculpture Garden, McCune Mansion and Spiral Jetty. Gilgal Sculpture Garden — Tucked behind houses and a strip of businesses, this quarter-acre lot is where LDS bishop and stonemason Thomas Battersby Child Jr.
Where in Salt Lake City are they?
Across Central City, Salt Lake City, Rozel Point, Box Elder County (Great Salt Lake), Near Lucin, Box Elder County (west desert, near Nevada line), Jordan Park, Poplar Grove, Salt Lake City and Downtown. Each listing gives the neighborhood and address so you can cluster a couple into one outing.
Are any of the weird outdoor & roadside oddities in Salt Lake City free?
Yes — 3 are free to visit, including Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels and International Peace Gardens. The rest are mostly low-cost.
Is this a good weird date in Salt Lake City?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Gilgal Sculpture Garden, for instance: Grab the free self-guided tour map at the gate and walk the loop at golden hour — it's a 15-20 minute path, but the sphinx and the Nebuchadnezzar's-dream sculpture (a giant stone head-body-legs figure made of clay, iron, brass and gold) give you plenty to stand in front of and argue about.
How were these weird outdoor & roadside oddities chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Salt Lake City guide.