Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills

You're rolling into Lone Pine, named for a single pine tree that once stood at the mouth of the canyon to your west. A cabin went up here in the winter of 1861–62; the post office followed in 1870. Long before any of that, this was Payahǖǖnadǖ, the "Land of Flowing Water," home to the Owens Valley Paiute, the Nüümü. They farmed this valley with skill that surprised the newcomers, hand-digging some sixty miles of irrigation ditches and electing a leader, the tuvaijü, to decide each year which fields to flood and which to rest.

Look right and you'll see the Alabama Hills, those rounded golden boulders piled at the foot of the range. They're the same granite as the jagged peaks behind them; they just weathered differently, smoothing into the shapes you see while the Sierra stayed sharp. Confederate-sympathizing miners named them in the 1860s after the raider CSS Alabama. Union men answered by naming nearby Kearsarge after the ship that sank her. Since The Round-Up rolled film here in 1920, more than four hundred movies have used these rocks as the Old West, India, ancient Rome, even other planets — Gunga Din, the Lone Ranger, Iron Man, Django Unchained. In 2019 Congress made it a National Scenic Area.

In the 1870s this was a hard-working supply town, freighting goods to the silver camps at Cerro Gordo, Kearsarge, and Darwin. Then, at 2:30 a.m. on March 26, 1872, a tremendous earthquake — comparable to 1906 San Francisco — leveled nearly every adobe building and killed about 27 people, more than a tenth of the town. The same fault that did it dropped the ground just south of here and filled it with water, creating Diaz Lake. And straight ahead rises Mount Whitney, the highest point in the Lower 48.