Lone Pine

Look up and to your left: the granite wall above town is the southern Sierra Nevada, crowned by Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48. The summit sits roughly two miles above the street you're driving — close enough that three Lone Pine locals, Charley Begole, Johnny Lucas and Al Johnson, made the first recorded climb in August 1873.

The Owens Valley around you has been home for thousands of years to the Nüümü — Owens Valley Paiute — and Western Shoshone, who built sedentary villages here and ran trade routes clear to the Chumash on the Pacific coast. Their descendants still live just outside town on the Lone Pine Reservation.

Lone Pine took its name from a single pine that once stood at the mouth of the canyon to the west, long since washed away in a flood. The town grew up in the 1860s as a supply point — Mexican settlers reportedly called it El Pueblo de las Uvas, the town of grapes — feeding the silver boom at Cerro Gordo, high in the Inyo Mountains across the valley to your right.

Then, at 2:30 a.m. on March 26, 1872, the ground tore open. The Lone Pine earthquake, on a par with the 1906 San Francisco quake, leveled most of the adobe town and killed around 27 of its few hundred residents. The fault scarp it left is still visible, and a roadside grave holds many of the victims.

One more legacy hides in the rounded boulders of the Alabama Hills just west of town. Starting with a 1920 silent film, this stretch has stood in for hundreds of movies — Gunga Din, John Wayne Westerns, High Sierra, Gladiator, Iron Man. The little film museum in town keeps the props.