Everything about Alabama Hills totally explained
Alabama Hills are a rocky formation on the eastern slope of the
Sierra Nevada mountains in the
Owens Valley of
California, near
Lone Pine, California. Though geographically considered a range of hills, geologically they're a part of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Managed by the U.S.
Bureau of Land Management as the
Alabama Hills Recreation Area, they're protected. The rounded contours of the Alabamas contrast with the sharp ridges of the Sierra Nevada to the west; however, the Alabamas are no older than the Sierra. Different patterns of erosion account for the difference.
Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous
United States, towers several thousand feet above this low range, which itself is 1,500 feet above the floor of Owens Valley. However, gravity surveys indicate that the Owens Valley is filled with about 10,000 feet of sediment and that the Alabamas are the tip of a very steep escarpment. This feature may have been created by many earthquakes similar to the
1872 Lone Pine earthquake which, in a single event, caused a vertical displacement of 15-20 feet.
There are two main types of rock exposed at Alabama Hills. One is an orange, drab weathered
metamorphosed volcanic rock that's 150-200 million years old. The other type of rock exposed here's 90 million year old
granite which weathers to potato-shaped large boulders, many of which stand on end due to
spheroidal weathering acting on many nearly vertical joints in the rock.
Dozens of
natural arches are among the main attractions at the Alabama Hills. They can be accessed by short hikes from the Whitney Portal Road, the Movie Flat Road and the Horseshoe Meadows Road. Among the notable features of the area are: Mobius Arch, Lathe Arch, the Eye of Alabama and Whitney Portal Arch.
History
The Alabama Hills were named for
CSS Alabama. When news of the
Confederate warship's exploits reached prospectors in California sympathetic to the Confederates, they named many mining claims after her, and the name came to be applied to the entire mountain range. Then, when
Alabama was sunk off the coast of
Normandy by
USS Kearsarge in
1864, prospectors sympathetic to the North named a mining district,
mountain pass, a peak, and a town after
Kearsarge.
[
]Film location
The Alabama Hills are a popular 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 films, Hopalong Cassidy films, The Gene Autry Show, and The Lone Ranger. Classics such as Gunga Din, Springfield Rifle, and How the West Was Won, as well as more recent productions such as Tremors and Joshua Tree, were filmed at sites known as Movie Flats and Movie Flat Road. In Gladiator, actor Russell Crowe rides a horse in front of the Alabamas, with Mount Whitney in the background, for a scene presumably set in Spain.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Alabama Hills'.
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