About Hollow Mountain
Hollow Mountain looks like a normal desert gas station until the building reaches the back wall and the back wall turns out to be a mountain. The convenience store in Hanksville was excavated directly into sandstone, allowing customers to buy snacks, drinks, and road supplies inside a cavern blasted from solid rock.
The store opened in 1984 after workers used more than one hundred cases of dynamite to hollow out the sandstone. From the highway, fuel pumps and commercial signs make the property look familiar. Step through the entrance, however, and sections of raw rock replace conventional construction.
The novelty is not merely decorative. This is a working convenience store that uses the mountain itself as part of the building. The effect becomes particularly obvious farther inside, where passages and walls retain the irregular surface and mass of the excavated sandstone.
Hanksville sits in a landscape where exposed rock dominates almost every direction. Hollow Mountain took the regional architecture to its most literal conclusion. Instead of constructing a store beside the rock, someone decided to put the store inside it.