Vasquez Rocks Natural Area and Nature Center

This guide to Vasquez Rocks in Los Angeles's high desert follows two very different stories carved into the same red sandstone: the 1966 Star Trek episode that turned this slab into an alien planet, and the outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez, who used these crevices as a hideout while robbing stagecoaches across California in the 1870s. The rocks themselves were shoved upward along the San Andreas Fault some twenty five million years before either story began, ancient riverbed sand squeezed into the jagged slabs you can climb today.