Approaching Red Rock Canyon

Look up the highway. In a mile or so the desert flatness gives way to fluted white cliffs streaked with rust, pink, and brown — the badlands of Red Rock Canyon, where the southernmost tip of the Sierra Nevada runs into the El Paso Mountains. You're seeing them the way travelers have for thousands of years: as a gateway.

The colors are a layered record of time. White beds of clay and volcanic ash sit beneath red sandstone, the red coming from iron in the sediment that has quite literally rusted in the open air, all capped here and there by dark lava. Buried in these layers, in what geologists call the Dove Spring Formation, is one of North America's richest late-Miocene fossil beds — roughly 12 to 9 million years old, holding three-toed horses, giraffe-like camels, rhinos, saber-toothed cats, and bone-crushing dogs.

To the Kawaiisu, who knew this country long before any road, the canyon sat on a trade corridor that reached all the way to the Chumash on the coast; their ancestors left petroglyphs in the El Paso Mountains just east of here. In the 1870s the bright cliffs guided Remi Nadeau's mule-team freighters hauling silver bullion down from the Cerro Gordo mines in the Inyo Mountains toward Los Angeles — and a stagecoach station already stood in the canyon by that decade. Around 1896 a German immigrant named Rudolph Hagen took over the canyon, claimed the water rights, and built a store; the post office he established here, named Ricardo after his son, ran from 1899 to 1916.

Out of sight to the east, the Los Angeles Aqueduct threads its great Jawbone Siphon through these same hills. The state began acquiring the canyon in 1968, running it as a recreation area before it was re-designated a state park in 1980 — and since the 1930s its cliffs have stood in for the Old West, alien worlds, and everything in between on Hollywood film.