Highway 14 Desert Movies

Highway 14 is one of those desert highways where RVs and tanker trucks drive slowly along the Sierra’s Mojave edge. As they move across a shrub-covered horizon, cars bunch up behind them, which is just enough annoyance to cause the occasional driver to bravely pass into oncoming traffic. That’s us. But we don’t realize we’re close to death, do we? We skip heading straight into California City and decide to make a ten-mile journey out of our way to Red Rock Canyon. It’s a quick tour into one of the sacred beating hearts of the film industry. Here, still in the same county as Bakersfield, but just outside of the valley, giant bugs attacked starship troopers, Natives fought battle after battle in the Hollywood rugged West against lonesome Homesteaders, and cavalry charged up desert hills; cowboys with parched lips got lost in the desert, Capricorn One astronauts hid out and ate snakes; and not to forget, Boris Karloff as a mummy made such a desert canyon an Egyptian land of mystery. I'm looking forward to tonight already. Can you tell?