Trona Pinnacles — rock formation
Image by Hear2heaL from Pixabay

Trona Pinnacles

  • 1 min read
  • 35.617° N 117.368° W

Interesting facts

  • The small middle group holds only about 100 spires but includes the tallest tower, and one tufa ridge there is some 800 ft long and 500 ft wide.
  • Geologists sort the spires into four shapes: towers, squat tombstones, massive ridges and low cones under 10 ft high.
  • The spires were once nicknamed Cathedral City for their resemblance to a cluster of church towers.
  • The three groups of pinnacles grew during three separate ice ages, as Searles Lake rose and fell with Sierra Nevada glaciers.
  • Searles Lake was one link in a Pleistocene chain of lakes that stretched from Mono Lake to Death Valley; similar tufa towers can still be seen today at Mono Lake.
  • Some thirty film projects a year are shot among the spires, from car commercials to Disney's Dinosaur and Lost in Space.
  • The cover photograph of Phoebe Bridgers' 2020 album Punisher was taken at the pinnacles.
  • In 1873 borax from the dry lake beside the pinnacles was hauled 175 miles to the port of San Pedro by twenty-mule-team wagons.
  • The salt beds of Searles Lake hold more than four billion tons of minerals, still extracted by pumping brines from wells.

Why it is worth it

The Trona Pinnacles are a forest of more than 500 rough stone spires rising from the dry bed of the Searles Lake basin in the Mojave Desert of California, some of them as tall as 140 ft (43 m).

The spires are made of tufa, a porous rock composed mainly of calcium carbonate, and they grew underwater. During the Pleistocene, between about 100,000 and 10,000 years ago, Searles Lake held water, and where calcium-rich groundwater seeped up through the floor of the alkaline, carbonate-rich lake, minerals precipitated around the springs and built up towers layer by layer. When the lake dried out, the towers were left standing in the open. They fall into three groups of different age: the northern group is about 11,000 to 25,000 years old, the middle group holds the tallest pinnacle, and the southern group, with some 200 spires, dates from about 32,000 to 100,000 years ago.

The site lies at about 1,800 ft (550 m) and covers some 3,800 acres of public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern; it was designated a National Natural Landmark in the late 1960s. Its otherworldly look has made it a favourite location for filmmakers: the pinnacles appear in Star Trek V, Planet of the Apes and Battlestar Galactica, as well as in music videos by artists including Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Phoebe Bridgers.

Getting there

The pinnacles lie about 10 miles south of the town of Trona. A BLM dirt road (RM143) runs about 5 miles to them from State Route 178, branching off some 7.7 miles east of the junction of SR 178 and Trona–Red Mountain Road. The nearest city is Ridgecrest, about 27 km away in a straight line. San Bernardino International Airport (SBD) is about 169 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in California 36The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Remarkable Rock Formations in the United States 18The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in the United States 68The Most Remarkable Rock Formations 107The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders 580

From the encyclopaedia

The Trona Pinnacles are an unusual geological feature in the California Desert National Conservation Area. The landscape consists of more than 500 tufa spires, some as high as 140 ft (43 m), rising from the bed of the Searles Lake (dry) basin. The pinnacles vary in size and shape from short and squat to tall and thin, and are composed primarily of calcium carbonate (tufa). They now sit isolated and slowly crumbling away near the south end of the valley, surrounded by many square miles of flat, dried mud and with stark mountain ranges at either side.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

35.61713, -117.36836per Wikidata