Jan 19, 2016 Into the Alabama Hills
Sometimes things don’t go right, even on vacation. There are enormous crowds over a three-day weekend. Your niece fractures her wrist. After facing harsh windstorms all weekend, there’s fresh powder on the morning that you leave. On the way home, you want to go to a certain café but it’s too crowded so you are forced to go to the pizza joint across the street. But it’s still awesome and worthwhile to spend time away from home with your family facing the elements, crowds, and other obstacles.
And yesterday when Wendy and I walked back to our car after we met up with my parents, siblings, and all the children for lunch, we found ourselves on a small road facing away from Highway 395 and looking toward the Alabama Hills. I’d visited them once when I was a child and sandstorms forced CalTrans to temporarily close what used to be a two-lane corridor between Los Angeles and Mammoth Lakes. What a perfect time to make a short detour from our journey home and revisit the spot with my wife.
The sometimes bubbly, sometimes steep, but always dramatic rocks that comprise the Alabama Hills have provided the backdrop for enough cowboy movies to justify a nearby Lone Pine Film History Museum and annual Lone Pine Film Festival. How The West Was Won, The Gay Cabellero, Hell Bent For Leather, Rawhide–the list goes on. But these days the area is more likely to remind visitors of the Cars attraction at Disney’s California Adventure with its undulating narrow path winding through surreal vistas, vanishing around curves, and seeming dropping off into nowhere often. The drive is much slower than the theme park ride but way more breathtaking.
We pulled over often to walk around and take pictures. For most of my adult life I’ve incorrectly thought that the “Arena” episode of TOS was shot in the Alabama Hills, but a lot of wandering and a little bit of research revealed that Captain Kirk actually fought Gorn at the Vasquez Rocks. Oh well. That’s another trip for another time, and there’s a note to self to revisit Tremors (which was actually shot at the Alabama Hills) and make more spontaneous detours. This valley is just one long smorgasbord…
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