About Hole N” The Rock
South of Moab, huge white letters painted across a sandstone cliff announce HOLE N THE ROCK. The name is unusually literal. Inside the cliff is a roughly 5,000-square-foot home carved directly into the rock, complete with fourteen rooms, furniture, shelving cut into stone, a fireplace, and a chimney drilled upward through dozens of feet of sandstone.
Albert Christensen began working the rock in the 1940s, using drills, excavation, and blasting to enlarge earlier spaces into a home and roadside business. Albert and Gladys Christensen eventually lived inside the stone structure, and the property developed into the kind of roadside attraction that could only become more elaborate with time.
Guided tours now take visitors through the preserved interior. Outside, the attraction has accumulated an exotic-animal zoo, gift shops, old equipment, sculptures, signs, and assorted roadside curiosities. The result is not a minimalist architectural experiment. It is a full roadside compound built around the fact that somebody decided a giant rock could simply become a house.
The attraction is open year-round according to its official site. Drivers do not need subtle signage to find it. The enormous painted letters across the cliff make the sales pitch before anyone reaches the parking lot.