Red Rock Canyon — North End

You're leaving Red Rock Canyon now. Glance back to your right and the fluted cliffs are already softening into desert — but those folds of red and white were a long time in the making. The colored beds belong to the Dove Spring Formation of the Ricardo Group, thousands of feet of sand, silt, ash and lava laid down roughly 8 to 12 million years ago, when this basin was sinking and rivers, lakes and volcanoes were busy filling it. The red comes from iron oxidizing in old streambed sandstone; the chalky whites are volcanic ash; the dark, hard caps are basalt lava that shielded the soft rock beneath and let wind and cloudbursts carve the rest into spires and chutes.

It's a borderland in more than color. You're at the junction of three of California's great geologic provinces — the southern Sierra Nevada, the El Paso Mountains, and the Mojave — stitched together by the Garlock and El Paso faults grinding past one another.

Those cliffs are also a cemetery and a film set. Embedded in the beds are horses, camels, mastodons, rhinos and saber-toothed cats from a wetter, greener age. Long before the cameras, the Kawaiisu — who called themselves Nuwa, "the people" — knew this canyon as a landmark on a trade route running clear to the Pacific, and left rock art in the El Paso ranges.

By the 1870s and '80s the painted walls guided freight wagons toward water; in the 1890s gold camps worked the hills to the east. Then Hollywood arrived in the 1930s, and the cliffs stood in for the frontier in countless Westerns — and later for other worlds entirely, from Jurassic Park to Capricorn One. It became a state park in 1968.