Vasquez Rocks in Agua Dulce CA, is most definitely “other worldly”! Our dear friends in Santa Clarita graciously took us to explore this hidden gem while our RV, Ladybug, was getting new brakes installed back at the beginning of February.
Welcome to Vasquez Rocks
Have you ever heard of Vasquez Rocks? We hadn’t. But it has a rich history related to movies and TV.
Vasquez Rocks Agua Dulce CA
Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park is a 932-acre park located in the Sierra Pelona in northern Los Angeles County, California. It is known for its rock formations, the result of sedimentary layering and later seismic uplift. It is located near the town of Agua Dulce, between the cities of Santa Clarita and Palmdale.
Why is Vasquez Rocks Agua Dulce CA famous
Movies and TV
The soaring angular formations that make Vasquez Rocks so other worldly looking.
Probably equally important as its otherworldly topography, Vasquez Rocks, which is just off the Antelope Valley Freeway en route to Palmdale, sit just at the edge of what’s known as the Thirty Mile Zone. This “Zone” is a radius around Hollywood in which union actors and technical crew can report for work before pay premiums kick in and jack up the costs of production.
Because of that it has made it a favorite location for film and TV directors for decades. From Saturday morning westerns of the 1920s and ’30s, such as “The Texas Ranger” in 1931 and “The Girl and the Bandit” in 1939 all the way through to latter-day productions, were shot there including the 1994 film version of “The Flintstones” and “The Big Bang Theory.”
These rocks looked like beached whales to us!
Vasquez Rocks was transformed into the fictional Stone Age town of Bedrock, for the 1994 live action movie “The Flintstones”.
Most often, it was a piece of alien looking geology right there in Southern California, amid the jagged, sandstone boulders of Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, a Santa Clarita Valley desertscape of prehistoric waves, frozen in time, that has done star turns in Hollywood productions since the 1920s.
Star Trek
Where are you Capt. James Tiberius Kirk?
The mission, from day one of Star Trek, when it premiered on America’s televisions on September 8, 1966, was ambitious. That mission was “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
So where did Gene Roddenberry’s TV series go to find that world? Well Vasquez Rock, of course!
The area made its series debut during Star Trek’s first season in the whimsical “Shore Leave,” about a planet where the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise encounter all sorts of fantastic characters and situations that turn out to be the products of an extraterrestrial amusement park. That amusement park should have been called Deep Space Disneyland.
A porthole to the sky at Vasquez Rocks.
This is where Capt. James T. Kirk famously battled a seemingly indestructible green lizard called a Gorn in the episode titled “Arena,” and it represented planet Capella IV, where Kirk and Dr. McCoy helped an Amazon-like Queen give birth to a warrior prince in “Friday’s Child.”
If you’re a Trekky you should recall Captain Kirk staring in confused wonder as one of the loves of his life, Ruth, inexplicably emerges among the rocks on planet Omicron Delta, supposedly many light years from Earth, in “Shore Leave.” In the same episode, Kirk engages in a rough-and-tumble brawl around the rocks’ distinctive angles and crevasses with a trouble making upperclassman who used to taunt him at Star Fleet Academy.
To give you an idea of the scale of Vasquez Rocks, that’s our friend Preston at his car!
Roddenberry and the Star Trek family quickly honed in on Vasquez Rocks. Was it coincidence that Cast. James Tiberius Kirk’s middle name was so similar to the bandit that the rocks were named for?
Over the last 50 years, Vasquez Rocks Agua Dulce CA, has also been used for episodes of the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Enterprise” as well as the films, including “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” and J.J. Abrams’ 2009 “Star Trek” reboot, where Vasquez Rocks served as part of the landscape for the planet Vulcan, in homage to the site’s recurring use in the original show.
Appeal as an alien environment
Beam me up Scotty!
The appeal of Vasquez Rocks as an alien environment is immediately obvious to anyone who visits the park, just south of the town of Agua Dulce.
Slabs of rock stretch skyward at steep angles out of the dirt and scrub brush to create dramatic formations seen in more than 200 films and television shows. It’s a production set that took shape 25 million years ago with volcanic activity virtually on top of the San Andreas Fault, at the juncture of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates.
The tallest peak among the Vasquez Rocks juts up 150 feet above the canyon floor, but that’s just the tip of the tip of this rocky berg, which extends an extra 22,000 feet into the earth below.
TV Westerns
Can’t you just imagine cowboys on horseback riding into the sunset here?
The location’s has been a backdrop for many, many big and small screen westerns such as The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Maverick, Blazing Saddles, The Wild, Wild West and Kung Fu.
One irony about Vasquez Rocks as a favorite location for westerns is that some 2,500 years ago, it was home to the Tataviam band of Shoshone Indians. The Tataviam referred to themselves as People Facing the Sun. The last full-blooded Tataviam tribe member, Juan Jose Fustero, died in 1921, at about the same time the center of the film industry shifted from New York to Hollywood.
Still a popular filming site
More recently, Vasquez Rocks has been the backdrop in episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Monk and even Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. In the 2016 Joel and Ethan Coen film Hail, Caesar!, a western scene is shot at Vasquez Rocks as a nod to all the cowboy films shot there in the past.
And the fabulous, geek centric The Big Bang Theory chose to film an episode there to pay homage to the location’s previous use in Star Trek.
Not just for filming
Hershi looked so tiny on this strange planet – LOL
Vasquez Rocks attracts hikers and rock climbers, but it also remains highly evocative to Trek fans who recall Kirk’s life and death battle against the tacky, but still menacing green dinosaur-like Gorn. It’s also a wonderful place for a picnic, away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
