Trona Pinnacles: Mars on a Tuesday

The Trona Pinnacles look like the set of a science fiction film because they are, frequently, the set of a science fiction film. The calcium carbonate tufa spires rising from the dry bed of Searles Lake, some of them reaching one hundred forty feet, have appeared in Star Trek Five, in Battlestar Galactica, in a long list of car commercials requiring a landscape that reads as alien without requiring visual effects. The Bureau of Land Management, which manages the site, has issued more film permits here than at any comparable California desert location.

But the spires predate Hollywood by a considerable margin.

Searles Lake held water for most of the last thirty thousand years, a deep playa lake fed by glacial runoff from the Sierra Nevada. The tufa formations precipitated at the lake bottom over thousands of years, calcium carbonate deposited layer by layer wherever alkaline water met the right chemistry. When the climate shifted and the lake began to dry, the spires were left standing in the open, exposed by the retreating water.

The Kawaiisu people, whose traditional territory encompassed the Searles Lake basin, knew this landscape long before any European arrived. Their presence here is documented through archaeological evidence and oral tradition; the lakebed and its surrounding mountains were travel and resource territory for generations.

The lake itself, or what remains of it, has been mined continuously since the eighteen nineties for potash, borax, and industrial salts. The Searles Valley Minerals operation is still active. The pinnacles stand between the two realities of the site: the ancient calcium record of a vanished lake and an active industrial extraction operation. Hollywood uses the former for its aliens. The mining company uses the latter for its chemistry.