Star Trek V: The Final Frontier | 1989
- Locations |
- California
- DIRECTOR |
- William Shatner
By common consensus, The Final Frontier is far from the best film of the Star Trek series, but it does have, in the planet ‘Shakari’, one of the best Star Trek locations.
Captain Kirk spends his shore leave climbing on El Capitan and Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park, California (and ends up on the Paramount lot in Hollywood).
‘Nimbus III in the Neutral Zone, the Planet of Galactic Peace’ is Owens Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, south of Lone Pine, central California, between Routes 395 and 136.
The planet ‘Shakari’, where Kirk gets a wee bit suspicious at the appearance of ‘God’, is the Trona Pinnacles, an area of tufa spires rising up from Searles Dry Lake Bed, Trona, near Ridgecrest, Kern County, central California.
The strange columns, up to 140 feet tall and covering fifteen square miles, were formed by algae 10,000 years ago when the area lay underwater. The area is reached by a bumpy, seven-mile dirt road (though it is accessible to 2-wheel-drive vehicles) off Route 78, about eight miles south of the town of Trona.
You can see the Trona Pinnacles again in the animated movie Dinosaur and as ‘Calima’, the birthplace of ape civilisation, in Tim Burton’s 2001 ‘re-imagining’ of the classic Planet of the Apes.
