CREDITS STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER, 1989 dir: William Shatner William Shatner Leonard Nimoy DeForest Kelley James Doohan George Takei Walter Koenig Nichelle Nichols David Warner Laurence Luckinbill

“What does God need with a starship?”

By common consensus, The Final Frontier is far from the best 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).

ëNimbus III in the Neutral Zone, the Planet of Galactic Peaceí is Owens Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert, south of Lone Pine, central California, between Routes 395 and 136.

The planet ëShakarií, where Kirk gets a wee bit suspicious at the appearance of ëGodí, 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 (it is accessible to 2-wheel-drive vehicles) off Route 78, about eight miles south of the town of Trona.

You can see the 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.