The Trona Pinnacles
Near Ridgecrest, California
Rising from the flat, cracked bed of Searles Lake are more than five hundred strange stone towers, some as tall as a fourteen story building. These are the Trona Pinnacles, and they look so alien that Hollywood has used them again and again. They stood in for distant planets in Star Trek Five, for the ape world in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, and appear in Battlestar Galactica, along with dozens of other films, television shows, and music videos every year.
The spires are made of a porous rock called tufa, a kind of calcium carbonate. They formed underwater, tens of thousands of years ago during the last ice ages, when this basin held a deep lake. Calcium rich springs bubbled up from below and met the alkaline lake water, and over time the minerals built these columns grain by grain.
When the lake dried, the towers were left standing exposed to the desert sun. They rise in three groups of slightly different ages, marking three separate ice age lake levels. The Bureau of Land Management protects them today, and they were named a National Natural Landmark in nineteen sixty-eight.
