Crazy stuff happens underground. Like how, a hundred thousand years ago, deep below the surface of what is now California, calcium-rich groundwater and alkaline lake water met, mingled, and solidified into lumpy, mineralized spires of tufa. These oddities eventually made their way to the surface of a dry lake bed east of the Sierra Nevada and west of Death Valley, where they tower up to one hundred forty feet high. Known as the Trona Pinnacles, these tufa spires serve as the background for more than thirty movie productions and commercials each year.
Tufa isn’t the only quirky mineral oddity to form under what was Searles Lake, though, and productions aren’t the only reason people flock to this sun-blasted playa. The Trona area (population: nineteen hundred) is also home to several forms of subterranean crystals much older than the tufa, and from 1941 until 2018, the Searles Lake Gem and Mineral Society held a weekend event of public digging called Gem-O-Rama.
Gem-O-Rama more than doubled the town’s population each October, bringing desert rat
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