Red Rock Canyon State Park

Deja vu in the desert? That’s Red Rock Canyon. Those cliffs and canyons may look familiar because you have seen them – not in your hiking boots, perhaps, but on the big screen. The cathedral-like badlands of the El Paso Mountains have been drafted into service for everything from cowboy shootouts to science fiction epics.

Back in Hollywood’s Golden Age, the canyon played backdrop for black-and-white Westerns, where shadow and light danced dramatically across the pleated cliffs. In the age of Technicolor, it was all about the hues: reds, pinks, whites, chocolate browns, and jet blacks stacked in layers like a cake baked by a geologist with a flair for drama.

The credits list is impressive. The epic Ten Commandments rolled cameras here. TV Westerns from Wagon Train to Rawhide galloped across the landscape. More recently, Red Rock doubled as an alien world in Jurassic Park, Battlestar Galactica, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. When the set designers want “otherworldly, yet oddly familiar,” they call in Red Rock Canyon.

But this is more than a filming location – it’s one of California’s desert jewels. Motorists speeding up Highway 14 from Mojave often slam on the brakes when they see the cliffs glowing in the morning or evening light. If they’re smart, they pull off, wander into the park, and discover what hikers already know: this is a compact but colorful wonderland of canyons, badlands, and bold desert skies.

There’s some history tucked into these rocks, too. During the Gold Rush, prospectors nosed into nearly every canyon in the El Pasos. Rudolph Hagen, an early landowner, left his name on the place. He also dubbed a stage stop and mining camp “Ricardo,” after his son. Today the Ricardo Ranger Station sits where the town once stood, and nearby Ricardo Campground is still the best place to pitch a tent under the Joshua trees and sandstone sentinels.

The park itself entered the state system in 1969 as a recreation area, but when off-road vehicles began tearing up the fragile hillsides, California wisely bumped it up to full park status in 1982. Since then it’s been a haven for hikers, naturalists, and paleontologists – the layered rocks hold stories of ancient mammals that roamed these badlands long before a director ever yelled, “Action!”