Elmer's Bottle Tree Ranch

The trees stand on the north side of the National Trails Highway, several miles south of Helendale, at the crest of a little hill. According to Roadside America, the density of the yard shows from at least a quarter-mile away. Each tree is an upright steel pipe with welded branches, and a glass bottle sits on every branch. San Bernardino County counts 200 trees and more than 1,000 bottles on two acres. SFGATE describes the bottles as blue, green and amber. The road is a stretch of Route 66 northeast of Victorville and west of Barstow, long since bypassed by Interstate 15. Cars pull onto the wide unpaved shoulder on both sides. The ranch asks drivers to pull off the highway completely, because traffic moves fast here.

Paths between the pipes

The trees are set close together, with room enough to walk between most of them. Some carry bottles sorted by color, by vintage or by brand. Most of the bottles are beer or liquor bottles, and a few trees hold glass and ceramic power-pole insulators. Other things are worked in among the glass:

• old metal toys, radios, wheel rims and manual typewriters
• rusting tools and appliances
• old streetlights and petroliana
• a peeling restaurant menu board, which an earlier version of the Roadside America write-up names as an A&W board
• an old jeep with its seats eaten away, about which Roadside America asked, “art or utility?”
• a vintage practice bomb casing impaled on a pipe

On a windy day the bottles sound. Roadside America called the result “pleasing or eerie, depending on your taste in randomly whistled bottle music.” The same writers warned that bottles occasionally break and that the yard holds “many abraded and rusting shin-level gewgaws.”

Higher up are the toppers. Favorite pieces were fixed to the tops of the trees, where a visitor would have a harder time taking one home. They include:

• abandoned red gas pumps
• an old city-limits sign for Barstow
• railroad signs and street signs from Long Beach
• a car door found somewhere in the desert
• a partial surfboard
• tires

SFGATE calls the place an ad-hoc museum to the high desert and Route 66.

There is no charge to enter. A wooden wishing well at the back of the property takes donations. A small gift shop runs out of a cardboard box and is open only now and then. The ranch keeps its gates open “Dawn to Dusk, sometimes before and sometimes after,” and closes them when work on the grounds makes that safer. A guest book is under construction from an old fire-suppression tank. Elliott Long, who runs the ranch, wrote in May 2026 that it was still unfinished when a mother and son arrived. While he explained the idea to them, they understood him to be asking for their signatures. “Language barriers are real! What was I supposed to say? No???” he wrote. “So they signed right there and the guest book had it’s 1st signature.”

A father’s bottles

The collection is older than the trees. Elmer Long, Sr., was an aviation engineer in Manhattan Beach, according to the county. In the 1950s he began collecting old glass bottles and other found things in the desert. He and his son Elmer camped out there and hunted for treasure with a metal detector.

The son, Elmer Evan Long, was born October 8, 1946. Roadside America says he moved with his family to the California desert in 1970, married there, and raised two sons. SFGATE says Elliott grew up in the house with two brothers. A son quoted by Route 66 News described his father as “father of 3 boys.” Elmer trained as a welder and worked in a cement factory. He inherited his father’s hoard of bottles and kept adding to it.

He took his own children into the desert in turn. By then the family had plenty of bottles, so, as SFGATE tells it, “the search was on for ‘junk.’” When the desert gave up nothing good, they went to the landfill and dug through other people’s trash.

The first tree, about 2000

Roadside America puts the first bottle tree in 2000. It says that on the same day, Elmer noticed Route 66 travelers pulling off the road to photograph it. Route 66 News reported that, by Long’s own recollection, his roadside park began “about the year 2000.” The county says the ranch was developed in the early 2000s. The method, as the county describes it, was old metal pipe, welded into limbs for the bottles to sit on.

In 2002 Long went full-time on the work, and the forest grew denser and larger. He lived in the house behind the trees, the family home where his sons had grown up. Route 66 News wrote that he “almost certainly took inspiration” from Miles Mahan’s Half Acre, also called Hulaville, in nearby Hesperia, which had a few bottle trees among its other pieces. Mahan’s Half Acre was bulldozed shortly after his death in 1997. A few of its artifacts remain on display at the California Route 66 Museum in Victorville. The Bottle Tree Ranch eventually became known worldwide, and it served as a backdrop in a horror film.

During several of the years he was building the ranch, Elmer was also caring for his father, who had Alzheimer’s. Elliott Long told SFGATE:

“He told people that the Bottle Tree Ranch was something he did just for the fun of it. But now that I’m here doing the work he was doing, it was 100% therapy. When he was putting up those bottle trees, I guarantee you, all he was thinking about was those desert trips and his dad.”

June 22, 2019, and the years after

Elmer Long kept expanding and changing the ranch almost until he died on June 22, 2019. Route 66 News reported that he was 72 and died after a bout with lung cancer. The family’s site says he passed peacefully, surrounded by friends and family. Roadside America and SFGATE both call his death unexpected. He was buried at Victor Valley Memorial Park in Victorville.

Route 66 News quoted a son, named there as Ellsworth Hayes: “He was a bad-ass Marine, husband, father of 3 boys, and of course, the ‘bottle tree man’ … He was my best friend.” In a 2014 interview with KCET, Long had said his sons would keep the ranch running after he died.

On July 13, 2019, Jim Conkle, a longtime Route 66 traveler, found the gates locked for the first time. A new chain and locks hung on the front gate beside two signs reading “CLOSED TILL MID AUGUST.” Word came at the end of that month that the ranch would reopen on August 31.

Elliott Long had always known the job would fall to him. As a boy, he told SFGATE, he could ride the desert in a Jeep with his father for hours, having so much fun he forgot to drink water. When his father died, he was living 120 miles away in Orange County with a baby at home. For three years he “didn’t set foot in the place.” A friend moved into the house to help and still lives there. Elliott, 48 at the time of the SFGATE story in May 2026, was then visiting about once a week. “I’ve had plenty of time to heal, and it still hurts every second of every day when I’m up there,” he said.

The work does not let up. Wind storms knock trees down, and Elliott estimated a backlog of “150 hours” in any given week. On the ranch’s website he wrote, “I won’t sugarcoat it: the Ranch is suffering. Time, weather, and neglect and the basic cost of running a property for free are catching up with it faster than we can keep up.” He told SFGATE he “never, ever” wants to charge admission. Instead he has considered selling merchandise or art, which might also make the place easier to hand on to someone else one day.

In a May 2026 post, written as Route 66 traffic swelled toward the road’s 100th anniversary, he wrote that the property needs more than someone to flick switches: “It requires presence and persistence. It requires a Brian.” Brian is the site manager. Elliott’s post lists him as “care taker, dog trainer, tour guide, jack of all trades,” and asks visitors who find him working in the yard, or resting in the shade, to say hello.

“I’ve never wanted to be the bottle tree man; that’s my dad,” Elliott told SFGATE. “I just want to be a tourist and go visit once in a while and marvel at it like the rest of the world.”