10 Other Times Star Trek Used The Vasquez Rocks

5. Initiations – Star Trek: Voyager

Star Trek Voyager Initiations
CBS Media Ventures

Deep Space Nine went on many locations to film — from lush gardens to gravel quarries — but sadly, never made it to Vasquez Rocks. Voyager, though, found its way back once. The Rocks stood for the site of a Kazon training moon Tarok (“Tarok” with a Kazon “a,” not a Cardassian “e”!). The crew spent a day there in July 1995 with Chakotay and Aron Eisenberg’s OTHER character, the Kazon-Ogla youth Kar, in Initiations.

Most of their scenes were located atop a series of vertical close rock slices, literally just across the main park road from the tilt rocks — but you’d never know it from the episode. It would be the last time to date that Star Trek, like Spock with his ears, would hide those two famous points.

Contributor
Contributor

Back when nerds and geeks were just called "hobbyists," Larry's ninth-grade science teacher ended a bewildering conversations with him about Halkans by finally saying, "Oh Larry — don't tell me you don't know Star Trek!"— along with a commandment to go home and begins watching the daily after-school rerun. The rest is history — well, future history, anyway. Larry had always been a NASA kid and a history fan (not so much sci-fi), so Star Trek fit right in: for the phenomenon that was worldbuilding before the term was invented, Larry felt passion-called to take up "backgrounding" and gap-filling before the term "retcon" was invented. Star Trek is fun and inspiring, but it doesn't pay the bills —at least in those days— but after college and work in theatre and print news, Larry somehow managed to combine both fields with his non-fiction Trek fandom and created the monster that today is Dr. Trek. His self-published, pre-Internet star charts and TNG Concordance were precursors to the official Stellar Cartography map set and the bestseller TNG Companion, after a move to Hollywood /SoCal in the 1990s boom years. Add in a stint as managing editor of official ST Communicator magazine, the first editor and later content producer of the original startrek.com, and the franchise consultant for everything from the Star Trek World Tour to the storied Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas. When Star Trek went wandering in the wilderness for the first time in 18 years amid the "Paramount divorce" of 2005-06, so did Larry — until, finally, the entrepreneur web world eventually found a path and a way to stay afloat. Since then, Larry's "Trekland" has come to mean more media projects and podcast/streaming alongside the old standbys like convention guest speaking and even text writing. Sure, there's The Trek Files for Roddenberry, his own Trekland Tuesdays Live, and Dr. Trek;s Second Opinion reaction shows — but that passion for spotlighting and archiving the creatives of Trek across all arenas and eras still drives him to pioneer experiences like the monthly backstage Portal 47 features, and the Trekland Treks day tours of Trek location sights. And now ... in-depth Dr. Trek turns for TrekCulture, too!