“Who is that idiot with the helicopter swirling up all the dust, burying my velociraptor?” asked Dr. Grant (actor Sam Neill), as he was surrounded in great clouds of fine silty desert sand.
Dr. Ellie Sattler (actress Laura Dern) responded, “I don’t know, but he is causing quite a problem.”
A huge white helicopter dropped to earth and the rotors slowly ebbed. A grey bearded, white suited older gentleman walked from the craft. “I am John Hammond (actor Richard Attenborough), a ridiculously rich person who has enough money to offer the both of you one gazillion dollars each to do me a little favor.”
“And that favor would be?” Dr. Sattler asked.
“To bring back to life the most dangerous and lethal creatures the earth has ever seen,” Hammond responded.
Grant nodded his head. “What could go wrong with that? Count us in.”
And the rest is history, with the multi-trillion-dollar success of the Jurassic Park film series.
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| What could go wrong? |
Nothing wrong at all, except for dinosaurs who had not seen the light of day for sixty-five million years suddenly wreaking havoc on humankind.
Spoiler alert, the film should have been called Cretaceous Park, since both the velociraptor and T-rex lived during that period and not the Jurassic era, but why quibble?
Steven Spielberg knew that would not work. Cretaceous Park does not roll off the tongue as does Jurassic Park. In fact, the term Cretaceous sounds as if a person should be seeing a podiatrist about some sort of toe fungus.
And what does all this have to do about traveling? Not much, but as I was examining the flaws in the movie, I suddenly wondered where it was filmed.
Now, I have been to Oahu where big galloping dinosaurs nearly ran over Grant and the kids he was trying to protect in Kualoa Ranch, (I meant the hinterlands of Isla Nublar), but I suspected that some of it was filmed right here in our backyard of Southern California.
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| Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii |
“A trip is called for,” I shared with Laureen.
My loving wife would never turn down a trip of such importance, but she surprised me. “I would love to go, but I made another commitment.”
The commitment was granddaughter sitting for our precious little Jasmine. I was on my own – of course, I love spending time with my beautiful granddaughter, but my editor can be like the soup guy from the nineties sit-com Seinfeld.
“No story - no pay for you!”
Those bosses, sometimes!
I headed out on Highway 14, toward Red Rock Canyon State Park.
I hate to admit it, but I have never experienced this state park. In fact, there are a lot of national and state parks I have yet to experience. Shame on me – but there are only five hundred days in a year, and the time flies when you are not paying attention.
Per the California Department of Parks and Recreation website, this is a must go place to visit.
‘Red Rock Canyon State Park features scenic desert cliffs, buttes and spectacular rock formations. The park is located where the southernmost tip of the Sierra Nevadas converge with the El Paso Range. Each tributary canyon is unique, with dramatic shapes and vivid colors.’
That sounded impressive. I had never even heard of the El Paso Range, believing it was in Texas, and here I was about to see it up close and personal.
This range lies in a southwest-northeasterly direction, east of Highway 14. That sounded rather confusing, so I just drove north on Highway 14 from Highway 58 and hoped I would run into the eighteen-mile-long mountain range.
Red Rock Canyon State Park is only sixteen miles northeast of California City, so I figured if I got lost, I could double back and ask for directions. Yes, I sometimes do that – but Laureen does not know this secret.
This whole section of the Mojave Desert was once home to various Native American tribes, dating back as early as three thousand years ago. In fact, the Kawaiisu are believed to be direct ancestors of these peoples and have lived in the area for possibly fifteen hundred years.
It is theorized that many native peoples lived in the Sierra Nevadas, but when a mini-ice age struck the area approximately three thousand years ago, they moved to the warmer climate of the Mojave Desert, where their ancestors made their permanent home.
My trip was looking like it was going to be very interesting. In fact, there are petroglyphs, created by the Kawaiisu in the El Paso Range, showing in graphic detail what life was like for these people.
In 1776, missionary Francisco Tomas Garces, met with a group of Kawaiisu while traveling through this part of the Mojave Desert. The natives found the Garces team rather worn out and hungry, and so they gave the explorers baskets full of meat and seeds.
Pretty considerate folks, those Kawaiisu.
In 1853, the United States government relocated the Kawaiisu from the area, since they were ‘impeding’ settler development in the area. Relations between the natives and the government soured at that point.
Who could have figured that would have occurred? Not very considerate, those government officials.
Both the El Paso Range and Southern Sierra Nevada’s were used by folks moving west from the east. The colorful cliffs and buttes surrounding, what would be later identified as Red Rock Canyon, became a guide for those making their way across the Mojave Desert.
I drove north on Highway 14 and came upon a road sign stating I was now entering the Red Rock Canyon State Park. I was not impressed.
Of course, enjoying a drive through the Mojave Desert is what I truly love doing, but I thought all the hoopla I had researched about the area would have been a little more enthralling.
Driving on a couple of miles north changed my mind.
“Holy Moley,” I said, and pulled over to the side of the road.
In the near distance stood some of the most majestic, beautiful, and weird looking landscapes I have ever seen.
Tall red, white, and sand-colored buttes seemed to be thrusting out of the desert floor, as if escaping the bowels of the earth. Columns upon columns, intersecting each other gave a vision as if from another planet. These are not the common hills a person sees while driving through the Mojave Desert. No, the scenery was awesome.
In fact, Hollywood had figured this out decades ago, with the filming of Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda Strain, Capricorn One, Planet of the Apes, and other movies or television series set on alien worlds.
Of course, Hollywood also used the canyons as filming sites for Westworld, The High Chaparral, Laramie, and many other westerns.
I drove on toward the buttes on the east side of Highway 14, even though both the east and west buttes were towering above the black highway – as if the hills had purposefully created an avenue for gawking visitors.
There is a large visitor parking lot at the base of an extremely impressive butte.
I parked and was astonished at how many people had done the same thing, with families, couples, and folks on horseback taking advantage of such an awesome natural formation.
Geologists explain how these structures were constructed: ‘Red Rock Canyon began about 300 million years ago when sand and gravel washed down from the ancestral Rocky Mountains to form alluvial deposits which became the Fountain sandstone on the edge of the present location on Manitou Springs. Fifty million years later, shifting dunes of fine sand drifted into the area to become the red Lyons sandstone of Red Rock Canyon itself.’
The geological explanation goes on for another thousand paragraphs but suffice to say – it took a long time and a bunch of different natural events to converge and create what I happened to be staring at.
However these buttes were formed, they were impressive and truly demonstrated the power and patience of nature. Three hundred million years – heck, my patience runs out if I must wait five minutes for my latte at Starbucks.
There are hiking trails in and around the buttes and are a must when visiting. To get up close and take in the view of the tall towers allows a person to feel overwhelmed with how beautiful nature can be.
It was if I were peeking up through tall chimneys into the sky above walking from one edge of a butte to the other.
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| A chimney view at Red Rock Canyon State Park |
Camping is allowed in the Ricardo Campground – not named after Ricky Ricardo, but an old timer who sold goods to miners seeking to find their riches in the area in the late nineteenth century, as well as a visitor center.
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| A couple of the camp sites at Red Rock Canyon State Park |
It is a perfect location for any sort of filming, and a place worth visiting time and again.
For further information: https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=631
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