The building above is the Rock Inn, or now Harley's Rock Inn, in Lake Hughes, California, north of Los Angeles. The Rock Inn was built by Joel Hurd, Sr., in 1927 to 1929, first as a wood structure and then of steel, concrete, and stone after fire destroyed the first attempt. It served as an inn, store, and post office, and it still has gas pumps as evidence of its long history of serving passers-by. Today its principal clients are motorcyclists, as both the Inn's name and its parked vehicles attest.       The Inn is built of diverse chunks of metamorphic rock, mostly granitic gneiss but with a variety of the other gneisses and perhaps granites. Several of the chunks contain cross-cutting veins reflecting a complex geologic history, as at the bottom of the lower of the two images below. The source of these chunks isn't hard to imagine - outcrops on the road west out of town provide similarly oddly-shaped chunks of granite and gneiss (see the bottom image). Thus the stone of the Rock Inn perhaps reflects the Inn's modern clientele: hard to break, hard to classify. not easy to fit in, and with a visibly long and heated history - but with a certain local charm nonetheless.

Acknowledgements: Much of the historical information above came from the Harley's Rock Inn web page  

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