2019 other side - part 7, Lone Pine: our "oasis," movies filmed in Alabama Hills - Travel With Us

While we know that Death Valley is in California, it is such a unique area that we felt like we first entered California on this trip when we got to Lone Pine, so here we are putting the state on our RV map.

As we left Death Valley, we saw Mt. Whitney in the distance (the white point in the far right-hand side of photo), the highest spot in the continental United States. We’ll be going there in a couple of days, so we can officially say that on this trip we’ve been at the lowest, highest, and hottest spots in the nation!

Do you remember me saying we had been hot in Death Valley? We are so ready for cooler and greener country. Since Lardeo, Texas, we’ve been in sand and gravel and would love a change. In Lone Pine, we stayed at Boulder Creek RV Park, our “oasis.” It had grass, trees, cooler temperatures, and full hookups.

But we still had sand and small rocks here along with the grass and trees! Our RV is under the trees on the right-hand side of the photo.

We got to do laundry when we got there and enjoyed the strong WiFi in the community center. Every morning the staff served coffee and freshly made muffins for the guests—a first for us! Friendly people were staying in the park whom we enjoyed talking with.

Movies Filmed in Lone Pine

Ever since I’ve known Barney, he’s talked about wanting to go to Lone Pine and drive the “back side of the Sierras,” as he called them. After we moved from California to Georgia, whenever he had a meeting in Southern California and we planned on going to see Matt and his family in Truckee, Barney tried to plan a drive along the “back side of the Sierras.”

This area is the backdrop for many of the westerns we saw as children in the 1950s and early 60s. I had never thought about the scenery when watching the TV shows and movies, but he had (probably since he lived in California from 6th grade on). His dream of coming here became my dream, so it was a major destination for us on this southwest swing to the West Coast.

I had always figured that these shows from our childhood were filmed in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, but Barney knew about the Alabama Hills, an eroded jumbled cropping of brown rocks in the Owens Valley just in front of the snow-capped Sierras.

You wonder how these hills got such a southern name? It’s from prospectors in the late-1800s with southern sympathies who named their mine after the CSS Alabama, a Southern thorn-in-the-flesh battleship.

Before we went to the movie backdrop area in the Alabama Hills, we went to the movie history museum in Lone Pine to get more information about what we’d be seeing.

Lone Pine is 200 miles from Los Angeles, within driving distance for movie directors. The first feature film shot entirely on location was The Round-Up, a 1920 silent Western starring Fatty Arbuckle in his first feature film.

From the 1920s – 1950s, more than 300 movies were filmed here, mostly Westerns. The reason for so many movies is that they were shown as series on Saturday afternoons when everyone, especially children, went to the movies. These were called B movies because they were filmed quickly, had low budgets, and followed a predictable formula.

The hills and mountains also served as northern India, the Gobi Desert, various parts of Arabia, and even Africa in 2 Tarzan films. I’m surprised it wasn’t the backdrop for stories taking place in Alaska. Probably a number of films you’ve seen, even if you don’t like Westerns, were filmed here. On this tour of the museum, see how many actors you know and how many movies or TV shows you’ve seen.

early movies and filming