Added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 22, 1972

You don’t need a successful SpaceX launch to visit Mars. You just need to drive 45 minutes north of LA, up the 14 freeway to a small town called Agua Dulce. That’s where you’ll find the Vasquez Rocks – as otherworldly a landscape as you’ll find in these parts. 

The heaving piles of sandstone that jut out of the ground at impossible angles have been a favorite backdrop for film and TV shoots since the 1920s – most famously in the original Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk battles the Gorn, but also in The Ten Commandments, Army of Darkness, The Muppet Movie, Blazing Saddles and so many more. Acts ranging from Radiohead to Rihanna, Tom Petty to BTS have shot music videos there (watch a bunch of them in the below playlist). But the Vasquez Rocks’ century-long Hollywood moment is but a blip in the 25-million year history of the region. 

Vasquez Rocks Geology 101

The rock formations that we see today were formed by the accumulation of sand, dirt, smaller rocks and organic materials. Over millions of years, all that sediment slid down from the surrounding mountains during rainstorms, floods, landslides and earthquakes. The older sediment would get covered by new sediment, putting pressure on the lower layers until they solidified and turned into sandstone. 

If that was all that was going on, geologically speaking, the Vasquez Rocks would be a flat plane, and you wouldn’t be reading this blog post. So what’s unique about this area such that you’d get formations pointing up at 40-52 degree angles? It’s all the seismic activity that’s taken place here. The Elkhorn Fault, a tributary of the San Andreas, runs right through the Vasquez Rocks park and it’s been very active over the past 25 million years. Shifting tectonic plates have lifted massive layers of rock off the ground here, and toward the sky. What we can see above ground is impressive, but what’s below is equally impressive. Geologists have estimated that parts of the formations at Vasquez Rocks go down four miles below the ground.

You end up with a sedimentary layer cake, with alternating bands of soft and hard sandstone, exposed to the elements over long periods of time. Some of the main rock formations appear brittle and jagged – they’re known as “hogs back ridges.” Other parts are smoother and rounder, or full of holes, all signs that the rock was soft and eroded over the millennia. 

At the west end of Vasquez Rocks park, there’s a Geology Trail where you can see small-scale examples of many of the geologic processes that created the main rock formations. There’s a sequence of signs with surprisingly metal descriptors like “DESERT VARNISH,” “BEDDING PLANES,” “DISPLACEMENT” “THE MAKING OF A ROCK” and “FROM HUGE BOULDERS TO TINY SANDS.” It appears that a Boy Scout put up those signs as an Eagle Scout project. I love them very much. 

Indigenous Inhabitants of Vasquez Rocks

The Vasquez Rocks are listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of what they can tell us about the Tataviam, the Native Americans that most recently called this area home. Archaeologists excavating the area have found burial mounds containing bowls, tools and weapons; pictographs around the park help tell their story too. If you follow the well-marked “nature-heritage trail” that stretches from the west end of the park, you can still see Tataviam grinding holes embedded in the rock, and a variety of art inscribed in red ochre and black walnut. 

The archaeological evidence, combined with ethnographies, genealogical research and Spanish mission records, suggests that the Tataviam derived from Shoshone bands of Native Americans who emigrated from the Great Plains to find more food and better weather several thousand years ago. By around 1000 BCE, the Tataviam had differentiated themselves from other Takic-speaking peoples, and by 450 CE they had settled in the Santa Clarita Valley. They lived off the land and without agriculture, eating mostly small game, squirrels, gophers and acorn mush, and drinking water from the local Agua Dulce springs. They traded with bordering tribes, including the Kitanemuk to the north, who gave them the name “Tataviam” (roughly translating as “people of the southern slopes” or “people facing the sun”). The coastal Chumash called them “Alliklik,” or “grunter,” a pejorative reference to what the Chumash perceived as their strange-sounding language. Sadly we don’t know what that Tataviam called themselves.

The Tataviam lived here for around 1300 years until the late 18th century, when the Spanish missionaries arrived. In 1797 the Mission San Fernando Rey de España (see Etan Does LA visit #17) was established, about 20 miles southwest of Vasquez Rocks, and between 1802 and 1816 many of the Tataviam were brought to the mission, baptized and forced to labor for the Spanish.

Imagine what a jarring change it must have been for a Tataviam tribesperson. You meet these new people who don’t speak your language. You leave the land your people have inhabited for over a millennium, you’re given a new name and a new religion, discouraged from speaking your language and practicing your religious traditions. Your diet changes and you have few opportunities to practice traditional Tataviam crafts. Young Tataviam grew up speaking Spanish, and within a generation or two, they no longer knew how to speak the language of their grandparents. Intermarriage with the Spanish and other tribes at the San Fernando mission hastened the dissolution of Tataviam identity; by the 1920s, there were no full-blooded Tataviam left. 

Thankfully there are still families around today who trace their lineage to the Tataviam. They’re called the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, with a tribal government based in the City of San Fernando. As they strive for official recognition by the federal government, they are actively working to preserve Tataviam traditions and educate the public about their history and culture.

The Story of Vasquez Rocks’ Namesake, the Bandit Tiburcio Vasquez

Let’s fast forward through the turbulent next few decades. California becomes Mexican territory in 1821 after Mexico wins its independence from Spain, and the missions are secularized in the 1830s. California becomes American territory after the Mexican-American War ends in 1848, and it’s admitted to the United States in 1850. Vasquez Rocks becomes public land. 

Around this time you have stage coach lines set up to connect the disparate communities in the Santa Clarita Valley; American settlers are setting up shop in Newhall, just southwest of Vasquez Rocks. Within a generation, California has been governed by three separate countries, and the Californios (Hispanic residents of pre-statehood California) are soon joined by hundreds of thousands of American and foreign prospectors coming to California after gold is discovered – first in Placerita Canyon (very close to Vasquez Rocks) in the early 1840s, and then James Marshall’s big find at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. As researcher Sarah Brewer puts it in her must-see 7-part lecture series, the Californios soon became “strangers in their own land.” 

It’s around this time of economic/population growth and social upheaval that we meet Tiburcio Vasquez, the California bandit that gave the Vasquez Rocks their name. Vasquez was born in 1835 in the central California city of Monterey. He was educated well, wrote poetry, and his family was a respected one with deep roots in California. They came to San Francisco in the 1770s with the De Anza expedition, and helped to found San Francisco and San Jose. But post-Gold Rush, Monterey was a violent place, and Vasquez started falling in with some bad folks. By 17 he opened a saloon and gambling parlor, and by 20 he was involved in the Roach-Belcher feud, resulting in the deaths of 14 men.

In the mid-1850s Vasquez moved down to LA County, ostensibly to be closer to his brother Chico, who was living in the Acton area, just east of Vasquez Rocks. An old criminal buddy named Jim Hefner also lived nearby, around Elizabeth Lake. Vasquez was first captured by police very close to Vasquez Rocks, after an attempted horse theft in Bouquet Canyon. He was sentenced to five years in San Quentin, during which he tried to organize four prison breaks, including a massive one in 1862 that left 10 people dead. This time, he escaped. 

Thus began a decade-plus run of murder, theft, stagecoach robberies and romantic exploits attributed to Vasquez, much of which was accomplished along with a crew of bandits. The Vasquez Rocks got their name because his posse supposedly used them as a hideout in the 1870s. One story holds that Vasquez’s men had a bloody shootout with a sheriff’s gang, right in these rocks – but when the shooting was over, they couldn’t find Vasquez’s body, because he had recently been shot by the cuckolded husband of a woman that Vasquez had shtupped, and was recovering in the Mojave desert when the shooting began.

Vasquez’s luck finally ran out when he was captured by police on May 14, 1874. There was a three-month manhunt for the guy, after he and an accomplice robbed a stagecoach near Ravenna. The following year, he was sentenced to death and hanged in San Jose on March 19, 1875. Reports from the time indicate that he faced the hangman’s noose with poise (“His demeanor was cool and manly during his imprisonment” said the New York Tribune) and that he was visited by many women in his prison cell the day before his execution.

Nobody’s going to argue that Tiburcio Vasquez was an upstanding citizen. But he’s become a Robin Hood-like folk hero, perhaps owing to the Californios’ sympathy for his lifelong anger toward Anglo authorities for treating Californios as second class citizens, and his generosity to those loyal to him. There’s a high school in Acton, a middle school in Salinas (formerly) and a network of health centers in the Bay Area that are named after Vasquez. Nice to know that a life of serious crimes doesn’t disqualify you from having your memory attached to educational and health institutions, or 25-million-year-old geologic formations. 

Hollywood Comes a-Calling

By the turn of the 20th century, most of the residents of the area surrounding Vasquez Rocks were living on small ranches, working the land and raising animals with varying success. The discovery of oil in Pico Canyon just west of Newhall (read about Pico No. 4 oil well in visit #97) yielded employment for some, and so did the Southern Pacific railroad, which came through in the 1870s. 

One of the earliest homesteaders in what’s now the Vasquez Rocks park proper was a miner named William Krieg, who acquired 240 acres around the area in 1919, and went to work in the productive Borax mine nearby. Krieg also raised cows and chickens, built bridges for the County, and even operated his property as a park, charging 50 cents per visit.

The famous sandstone rock formations were part of Krieg’s property, and he found a new revenue stream in the 1920s, when he started leasing the property to the nascent film industry based in Hollywood. When Krieg died in 1934, his nephew Ray Toney took over the property, and continued to lease it for film shoots. The benefits of shooting at Vasquez Rocks were many – beyond the out-of-this-world geology perfect for all sorts of genres, there was also dense vegetation, graded roads and parking areas that companies could use for staging shoots, accessible water sources, etc. And there were benefits to the Krieg/Toney family too, beyond the money. The Toney family built their house on the property with materials left behind by Hollywood productions!

The earliest shoot we know about was Human Stuff, a lost Harry Carey film shot here in 1920. The Last Frontier followed in 1926, and Beyond the Sierras in 1928. In the ‘30s, the westerns took over (Outlawed Guns, Secrets, Son of the Border), and some classic horror flicks were shot here too – both Dracula and Frankenstein from 1931, plus Werewolf of London (watch a clip here). Since then, Vasquez Rocks have hosted shoots for many dozens of films, hundreds of TV shows (from Bonanza to NCIS, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to six separate Star Trek series), video games, music videos…they were even drawn into an episode of The Simpsons. The Rocks remain a popular spot for Hollywood productions, partly because it sits just within the “Thirty Mile Zone” – a radius around Hollywood within which shoots are still considered “local,” such that producers can hire union workers without having to pay premium benefits.

In 1964, the 14 freeway was constructed, connecting Los Angeles to the Antelope Valley and passing right by Agua Dulce and the Rocks. That same year, LA County entered into a deal they’d been attempting to sign for years – the Toneys agreed to lease their property to the County month-to-month. In the years since, the remaining private land was donated or sold to the County, which has continued to develop it as a park. 

There are few places in Los Angeles that have visible remnants of such a long span of history as Vasquez Rocks. Whether you care about geology, botany, Native American history, transportation, early LA settlers, the growth of commerce, the entertainment industry or just taking an epic hike close to the city, the Vasquez Rocks offer something for you. It’s an amazing place to soak in 25 million years of natural and human history.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Boessenecker, John: “Bandido Tiburcio Vásquez at Tres Pinos” (excerpt of Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vásquez; University of Oklahoma Press, 2010 – reposted on History.net)

+ Brewer, Sarah: “Geology of Vasquez Rocks” (abstract of Master’s Thesis for California State University, Northridge, 2016 – accessed via SCVHistory.com)

+ Brewer, Sarah: “History of Vasquez Rocks” (7-part video series, 2018-2019 – SCVHistory.com)

+ “Execution of a Bandit” (New York Tribune, March 20, 1875 – accessed via SCVHistory.com)

+ Glenn, John M.: “A History of Vasquez Rocks and Vicinity.” (Department of Recreation and Parks, County of Los Angeles, January 15, 1974 – accessed via SCVHistory.com)

+ Lewis, Randy: “How Vasquez Rocks, L.A.’s onetime outlaw hideout, became ‘Star Trek’s’ favorite alien landscape” (LosAngeles Times, September 8, 2016)

+ Szabolcsi, Katalin: “Searching for Tataviam Answers” (The Signal, October 29, 2000 – accessed via SCVHistory.com)

+ Vasquez Rocks Natural Area and Nature Center (LA County Parks & Recreation)

+ “List of productions using the Vasquez Rocks as a filming location” (Wikipedia, accessed 5/2/23)

+ Agua Dulce & Vasquez Rocks (SCVHistory.com)