After Earth | Potash Evaporation Ponds — electric blue in the red rock

Drive Potash Road, State Route 279, out of Moab and for fifteen miles it hugs the north bank of the Colorado beneath varnished cliffs, past petroglyph panels and dinosaur tracks you can spot from the driver's seat, until the canyon opens and the ground turns an impossible blue. These are the Cane Creek evaporation ponds, where brine pumped up from a potash seam 1,100 metres down is dyed and left to the desert sun. The colour is not a filter. It is food-grade blue dye, added to absorb heat and speed the crystallisation of potassium chloride.

After Earth's Utah unit worked along this corridor. The Moab Times-Independent reported the production filming at multiple locations near State Route 279 and on land owned by Intrepid Potash, and Moab's own film-tourism guides point to the ponds at the foot of Dead Horse Point as one of the images the film carried away from the county. It is a good fit for a story about a colonised planet: an industrial geometry cut into raw Permian sandstone, entirely legible as somebody else's terraforming.

The road is paved and passable in any car. The ponds sit near the end, around a bend from the processing plant, and the best overhead view is from the Dead Horse Point rim or the Shafer switchbacks above.

Go in July if you want the full range — turquoise, jade, ochre, and salt-white in adjacent cells. Then look up at the cliff and remember that everything blue in front of you was pumped out of it.

Locations reported by the Moab Times-Independent and Moab film-location guides. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.