UNUSUAL EXHIBIT INHABITS LONELY OUTPOST.

Byline: Christopher Smith The Salt Lake Tribune

A visit to the newest tourist attraction in this Utah-Nevada border desert town has an undeniable ``X-Files'' intrigue.

Cryptic signs hung on fence posts and telephone poles, hand-printed with the letters ``C-L-U-I'' lead to a long-deserted Army air base on the edge of town.

At the end of the gravel road past symmetrical rows of drab wooden barracks, a threatening U.S. Air Force sign warns against going any farther. But pay no attention. Just back up and turn through an open chain-link gate rimmed with barbed wire and posted ``Keep Closed At All Times.''

Near the doorway of one of the nondescript bunkhouses, a small paper card bears a long-distance telephone number. Dial it, and an automated message provides the secret to unlocking the door to the barracks.

Inside, it's empty except for a series of white panels suspended from the ceiling, running the length of the room. Each panel is covered with photographs, maps, charts and descriptions of local chemical plants, bombing ranges, hazardous-waste incinerators and mysterious military installations.

Welcome to the Wendover Exhibit Hall, a place as off-beat as it is off the beaten path. What's it all about? Decide for yourself.

``We kind of feel the landscape speaks for itself,'' says Matthew Coolidge, spokesman for the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), which opened the exhibit hall in June. ``When people journey into the countryside, they tend to go to the places that yell the loudest, like the national parks, the roadside attractions. The majority of stuff is neglected or unseen. And that leads to a skewed perspective of what America really looks like.''

Staffed periodically by a caretaker, CLUI's Wendover Hall is the first in a series of ``exhibit spaces'' around the country that the nonprofit research group is developing as part of a ``Land Use Museum.'' By setting up interpretive stations that reflect different attitudes and perspectives toward land use, CLUI's stated goal is to ``create a public forum where disparate ideas can meet and reflect off one another.''

Coolidge says it's too early to tell if any of that reflection is happening. Indeed, it's tough to say if anyone outside the exhibitors has even seen the Wendover exhibit.

Recently, a guest register inside the exhibit hall barracks carried only two names, logged on July 15. Low turnout aside, don't expect a Wendover Exhibit Hall advertising blitz.

``There's something appealing about having it be this thing that people stumble onto,'' says Coolidge. ``We don't want to kill the experience of exploration, because that's how much of this came about. All we ask is that people turn out the lights and lock up when they leave.''

The exhibit is a gallery of what CLUI calls ``anthropic'' landscapes, terrain formed or altered by humans. It is an explorer's showplace of the unobtrusive, the underappreciated and the unheralded, presented in a just-the-facts style, void of any political or environmental opinion.

Most of these places you won't find in the AAA guidebook. There is a military document detailing ``Building 501'' at the Little Mountain Test Annex, a secretive, closed-to-the-public U.S. Air Force installation on a remote shore of the Great Salt Lake. A photo of the Aptus Hazardous Waste Incinerator, where 30,000 tons of paints, PCBs and old chemicals are torched annually, shows the plant's entrance-sign slogan: ``Burning Waste At Safety's Pace.''

Also featured is Lakeside, home of the infamous $60 million giant water pumps designed to keep the Great Salt Lake from flooding, finished just in time for the start of a long drought. There is the World War II redux of German Town, an area within Dugway Proving Ground used for testing incendiary bombs and built to exactly duplicate structures found in Germany, down to the wooden building beams imported from Murmansk.

Black-and-white photos show off the interior of Jukebox Cave, located just outside of Wendover, when World War II soldiers stationed here installed a bar and dance floor inside a natural cave to escape the wilting heat.

Some of the featured landscapes are traditional haunts for camcorder-toting visitors - such as the Golden Spike National Monument and Kennecott's open-pit mine - but their nontraditional presentation makes them seem ominous.

Others are surreal in their own right.

Robert Smithson's ``Spiral Jetty,'' an artsy, curlicue strand of rocks extending into the Great Salt Lake, was created in 1970.

Another lesser-known piece of ``land art'' on photographic display is the ``Sun Tunnels,'' four big concrete tubes laid out in an ``X'' configuration in the west desert. Placed in 1976 by Nancy Holt, each of the 18-foot-long, 9-foot-diameter pipes has a series of holes punched into it, corresponding to the patterns of constellations in the night skies.

General directions are given for all the featured landscapes.