California Touring Hywy 395 Alabama Hills 3'09

On a recent  business trip to California I took a detour along  Highway 395 through the Alabama Hills.  This was a   vacation area for us when we lived in California. And one of CC's  top ten places to for photography.

 

  The Alabama Hills are a "range of hills" and rock formations  near the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains ,  west of  Lone Pine California.

 

Though geographically considered a range of hills, geologically they are a part of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Alabama Hills are a "range of hills" and rock formations  near the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains ,  west of  Lone Pine California.  Though geographically considered a range of hills, geologically they are a part of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

 Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, towers several thousand feet above this low range, which itself is 1,500 feet (460 m) above the floor of Owens Valley.

 

 The Alabama Hills are a popular filming location for television and movie productions, especially  Westerns set in an archetypical "rugged" environment. 

Since the early 1920s, 150  movies and about a dozen television shows have been filmed here, including tom Mix, Hoppilong Cassidy fils, the Gene Autry Show,  and the Lone Ranger. Classics such as Gunga Din,   The Violent Men (1955 film),  and part of how the West was Won, were also made here.

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 More recent productions such as Tremors and Joshua Tree, were filmed at "  movie ranch" sites known as Movie Flats and Movie Flat Road. I

 n  Galdiator, actor Russell Crowe rides a horse in front of the Alabamas, with Mount Whitney in the background, for a scene presumably set in Spain.  Star trek Generations was partially filmed here........as were many many more.

 Interestingly the area is inextricably tied to the history of the South.   You see, The Alabama Hills were named for CSS Alabama. When news of the  Confederate warship's exploits reached prospectors in California sympathetic to the  American Civil War Confederates, they named many mining claims after the ship, and the name came to be applied to the entire range. When the Alabama was finally sunk off the coast of  Normandy by the USS Kearsarge in 1864, prospectors sympathetic to the North named a mining district, a mountain district and a mountain pass, a mountain peak, and a town after the Kearsarge

   You can learn more about the Alabama Hills and its hitory by visiting Dow Villa Motel and Cafe in the town of Lone Pine