Tilted Cube survives ... but Walnut, not so much

Here's a movie rock I call Tilted Cube, shown in the 1952 Durango Kid movie "Smoky Canyon," which starred movie cowboy Charles Starrett near the end of his run as the Durango Kid and in B-Westerns in general. Tilted Cube wasn't one of the most widely filmed features on the ranch, but it turned up from time to time.

I ran across it on a recent visit to the former movie ranch, still alive and well, if those terms can be applied to a rock. These days it's a part of the Indian Hills Mobile Home Village, tucked in behind a doublewide. It took a while to track it down, partly because it's well out of the way and also because it doesn't look quite as "cube-like" as it did in the movies. Today you would have to climb on top of a mobile home for the full cube effect, but you still can match it up in these two shots: It has what might be called a "competition stripe" running across it in both photos.

Tilted Cube had a neighbor, Walnut, which I've blogged about before — click here to see that entry. The above shot, which includes the rest of that same frame seen above from "Smoky Canyon," shows the proximity of Tilted Cube to Walnut, partially visible as the large, dark shape on the right.

Here's a better look at Walnut, from the 1943 Republic serial "Secret Service in Darkest Africa," starring Rod Cameron, Joan Marsh and Duncan Renaldo. Cinematography was by Iverson great William Bradford, and the serial was directed by the prolific B-movie director Spencer Gordon Bennet. Walnut was a mighty rock — you can get a sense of the scale of the rock by the size of the car next to it. Even so, it didn't survive the construction of the mobile home park back in the mid-1960s. One of the most lamented of the now departed "classic rocks" in that area of the old Iverson Ranch, Walnut remains only as a memory — and in these images from old movies.