Sierra Nevada is a mountain chain running roughly parallel to the coast of California and about 200 km inland from the coast. It rises on several places more than 4,000 metres high and its tallest mountain, Mount Whitney, is at 4,418 metres the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States (that is excluding Alaska and Puerto Rico).
To the east of Mount Whitney in the valley below is a small town, Lone Pine, where Jennifer and I stayed with a group of photographers after we had visited Death Valley. And above (to the west of) Lone Pine is Alabama Hills, an extraordinary landscape of curiously shaped granite rocks that has inspired both photographers and movie makers and writers during the last two hundred years.
Lone Pine is situated in Owens Valley, 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) below the Sierra Range. This makes it the deepest valley in the United States and as the winds are predominantly westerly, Owens Valley is located in the rain shadow of the Sierras and has a typical desert climate. Alabama Hills is around 200 metres above Owens Valley but still in the same rain shadow and the same desert conditions.
Alabama Hills and Sierra Nevada both consist of granite, but they have weathered differently. Alabama Hills is much lower and was covered in sediment that caused the iron in the rock to oxidize giving it its orange tint. Five million years ago an uplifting process started, and the eastern end of Sierra Nevada was uplifted to its present height. And the process continues still. Glacial ice eroded much of the Sierras, but lower down, at the Alabama Hills, the erosion was caused by wind, blowing sand and water. And we got the rounded boulders, ledges, spires and arches of Alabama Hills, very different from the cragged mountains of the Sierras. Alabama Hills are not mighty; they are whimsical and surreal!
Local miners operated here in the nineteenth century and during the Civil War miners that were sympathetic to the Confederate cause named the hills the Alabama Hills honouring the confederate warship CSS Alabama that captured or burnt 65 Union ships before it was sank by USS Kearsarge in 1864.
In the 1920s the Hollywood Movie industry discovered the beauty of Alabama Hills and it has been used as a location for more than 400 different movies, mainly westerns but also other movies like Iron Man Gladiator a Star Trek movie and one Transformer moviemwere filmed here. The restaurants in Lone Pine are filled of memorabilia from “the golden time of western movies”, when stars like Hop-a-long Cassidy, Gregory Peck, Richard Widmark, Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood to mention a few frequented the taverns. Still every autumn there is a Lone Pine Film Festival celebrating this bygone time.
The unusual formations of Alabama Hills Eye of Alabama
