Alabama Hills

The strangeness of the Alabama Hills is that they are made of the same rock as the mountains behind them and look nothing alike. Both are granite, raised by the same faulting; the difference is weathering. Up high, freeze and thaw split the Sierra into ridges and spires. Down here the granite sat buried in soil for ages while water worked on it chemically, rounding every edge, so the hills came out as heaped golden boulders. Dozens of natural arches sit among them. Mobius Arch is the famous one, a short loop off Movie Road, and its window frames Lone Pine Peak and the summit of Mount Whitney almost too neatly to be accidental.

Film crews have been coming since a silent Western shot here in 1920, and more than four hundred movies have used these rocks: Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, Gunga Din, and a long line of others through to modern science fiction. The Museum of Western Film History in Lone Pine keeps the receipts, and the town throws a film festival every October.

This is Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone country, and the tribe is still here. Congress made the hills a National Scenic Area in 2019, protecting 18,610 acres that had been managed loosely for decades. Camp in the designated sites rather than wherever you like; the soil crust and the wildflowers do not recover quickly.