Red Rock Canyon State Park

 “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. 

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.

Kualoa Ranch, Hawaii

Turns out the opening scene when Hammond meets Grant and Sattler was filmed in the Red Rock Canyon State Park. A mere hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles and one thousand three hundred miles from British Columbia, Canada.

“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.

A chimney view at Red Rock Canyon State Park

The whole experience was other-worldly, and I expected a cryptid or an alien to look out from one the thousands of caves, and tell me to get lost.

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.

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          

Dinosaurs in the Desert

After spending a quiet Sunday afternoon watching, or to be more exact, re-watching Jurassic Park, two issues were quite apparent. Being a leisurely Sunday afternoon meant not really thinking too deeply into this marvelous film adapted from the novel by Michael Crichton, but two points did resonate with J.

First, there were no T-Rexes during the Jurassic Period (which was roughly 145 million to about 200 million years ago). The Tyrannosaurus existed during the Cretaceous period around 66 – 145 million years ago, probably more like 66 to 68 million years ago. The reason the film was named Jurassic instead of Cretaceous was probably the sound – Jurassic has a better ring than Cretaceous and really, how many people could pronounce that era anyway.

Hollywood has a license and that license is known as a poetic one. And that is defined as - the freedom to depart from the facts of a matter or from the conventional rules of language when speaking or writing in order to create an effect.

In other words – they lie, but as professional writers we at J and L prefer to call it ‘embellishing’ the facts. A lie is such a nasty turn of phrase.

The second point was that not all dinosaurs are gone from this earth. In fact, in Southern California, a sleepy little area known as Cabazon, there exist two behemoths just north of Interstate 10. That stretch of asphalt is the home of both an Apatosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Both of these creatures roamed the globe during the Cretaceous Period when the earth in which they resided was warm and tropical. They flourished for millions of years until, according to most scientists, a huge asteroid decided to play bumper pool with the earth down in the Yucatan about 65 million years ago. Large clouds of dust blew up into the atmosphere blocking sunlight for nearly two years which killed off the herbivores and then when they perished, the carnivores, having no food source, were next.

Only certain land dwelling creatures still existed after the tragic present sent to earth from outer space - primarily rats but let's not talk about politicians.

Claude K. Bell at the beginning of Dinny

The two large dinosaurs are actually the creation of Claude K. Bell who had a restaurant named the 'Wheel Inn Restaurant' in Cabazon. The restaurant started in 1958 and made it all the way to its closure in 2013. Bell decided from his time as a sculptor and portrait artist for Knott's Berry Farm, that what he needed was  a little sideshow to draw more customers to the restaurant. With that in mind, he started working on Dinny the Apatosaurus  (Dinny, short for dinosaur) in 1964. And Dinny was a huge undertaking. She measures 156 feet in length and 45 feet in height. That is one big old dinosaur. It took nearly twelve years to complete the steel framed sprayed concrete colossus, at a cost of $300,000. Dinny is hollow inside, with a steep staircase upon which the hearty can troop up into the belly of the herbivore and shop for trinkets while learning a little of the history of this tourist attraction.

The completed project - well not really

This concept of Bell's worked very well and business boomed - thus part of the reason the restaurant was a success for 55 years. Of course, Bell wasn't done with Dinny alone - no, the T-Rex was next. But Rex wasn't started until 1981. Today this prehistoric beast stands 65 feet tall. It had a slide for a tail, but that didn't last long, and it was filled in with concrete. Rex stands watch gazing southward toward the Interstate and watching the visitors who pay tribute to a creation by a very talented and patient artist by the name of Claude K. Bell.

That's one big dude, er dudette!

Unfortunately, Bell passed away in 1988, and so his dream of a Woolly Mammoth and prehistoric garden never came to fruition.

"Oh Yeah - I'm bad to the bone," yells Mr. Rex

The land and everything Bell had built was sold by his heirs in the 1990's to a partnership which received approval from the city of Cabazon to erect a motel, restaurant, and other financially sound ideas for the rest stop. The area is now known as a 'creationists dream' where evolution is poo-pooed and a museum located near the dinosaurs explains their belief.

Here at J and L will not go into this area but all views are valued and must be looked at on their own merit. It is up to the people reading explanations and doing research on their own to come up with the truth they desire to believe in. But, we thought it was an important aspect to add to this blog.

So, there after an afternoon of watching a film about dinosaurs chasing and eating people around a fictitious island the idea of Cabazon came into J's mind.  And it so happened that J and L's travelling buddy Paul Bakas had been on a recent trip with them and stopped to investigate these giants looming over the skyline of Cabazon.

The really positive side of this is that there are no Raptors running loose - if there had been, no stopping by this research team would have occurred.

No taking sides at J and L - that would be too much to bite off

On a side note and an important one - Dinny and Mr. Rex are celebrities. They had made appearances in the 1985 comedy - Pee Wee's Big Adventure, in the 1985 music video for Tears for Fears - Everybody Wants to Rule the World, in 1988 on the album cover for Notes from the Lost Civilization by Tonio K's and numerous other documentaries, music albums/videos and the like. The two are as famous as perhaps the original ones during the Cretaceous period - yeah, and not the Jurassic Period.

Attention - this tram will not be stopping any time soon