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The “Bean” (Cloud Gate) sculpture in downtown Chicago, by Anish Kapoor, is one of the most beautiful and engaging contemporary sculptures in the world.

Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1939 masterpiece of residential architecture in Bear Run Pennsylvania, is arguably the most important contemporary house in history.

The 1941 Alden B. Dow home and studio, in Midland, Michigan is one of the most important contemporary American buildings of the 20th century.

Bodie Ghost Town in the California Bodie Hills, east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, is the most extensive ghost town I have ever visited. It is spooky but very interesting.

The Old Iron Ore Dock in Marquette is one of my favorite structures in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was built as a gigantic, purely functional iron ore gravity feed dock on the waterfront in 1931. Decommissioned in 1971, it is now a hauntingly beautiful, symmetrical, cathedral-like edifice to the iron mining industry in that region.

Ghost Cave at Pictograph Cave State Park is near Billings, Montana. There are several caves in the park with impressive Native American pictographs up to 2,100 years old. I really like how the low cave opening is centered between the two huge rock masses.

Sam Clemens/Mark Twain’s 1862 silver mining shack is in Unionville, Nevada. He lived there only a short time, apparently hated mining, and continued west.

The Tufa towers in Mono Lake, California are amazing sculptural rock formations formed under water as calcium bubbled up through carbonate-rich lake water. They are now exposed as Mono Lake has been significantly drained for human uses.

Elephant Rock in the Valley of Fire in Nevada is the most zoomorphic rock formation I have ever seen. It is larger than an elephant, maybe the size of a mastodon.

The ancient Bristlecone Pine is among the longest-lived life forms on our planet (4,000+years). It was magical to visit them in the White Mountains of California at the 11,000 ft. above sea level tree line.