The Alabama Hills

In which Moominmama hugs a 3,000 year-old tree and thrills to the views from the Alabama Hills in California...

Due to a couple of errors, Moominmama did not make her planned camping spot after exiting Death Valley, but this turned into the best mistake she ever made when she landed at the foot of Mount Whitney in the Alabama Hills. She's been drinking her coffee most mornings outside, watching the sun light up the snow and grey cliffs of the Sierras.

I am not the only person to feel like I've discovered a gem. Hollywood has used this area around Lone Pine for television and movies since silent film. If you ever watched the Lone Ranger, Bonanza, How the West Was Won or more recently Django Unchained, you've seen the Alabama Hills.

They've even been a stand-in for India in the film Gunga Din or for exotic planets in Star Trek. And there's a funny story about how it came by its name. During the Civil War, early prospectors sympathetic to the South named the area after a Confederate ship famous for raiding merchant vessels. It was sunk in 1864 off the coast of Cherbourg, France by the USS Kearsarge, for which a peak of the Sierras is named. 

So here, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas, we have the Alabama and the Kearsarge facing off again. The shipwreck, incidentally, was discovered in 1984 and has been the subject of archeological excavations in a cooperative venture between France and the U.S.

For filmmakers, the landscape offers not only sweeping vistas of the Sierras as a backdrop but wide open sagebrush plains to stage battles between the cowboys and the Indians or to set up dusty western towns or ranches. 

It also has interesting canyons for ambushes and outlaw hiding spots. The dirt roads that thread through the area started thanks to the film industry and their photography equipment.

The town of Lone Pine grew as it served the film crews, providing horses, cattle, wagons and extras, as well as the food and water that kept the actors and film crews going.

Lone Pine is now home to the Museum of Western Film History, with many artifacts from the old and new westerns. Even I was impressed to see the director's chair from Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino sat here!

There are exhibits featuring old film equipment, stuntmen (some of the early ones were Lone Pine natives), singing cowboys, famous actors like John Wayne, guns, rifles, saddles and hats, with a video about authentic Stetsons! There's a life size stagecoach from the film Rawhide.

You can also pay a visit to Movie Road with sites identified by the films shot there. Moominmama ventured into Lone Ranger canyon and an area that appeared in Django Unchained (not that I recognized it!)

Today, the area features frequently in advertising, particularly car ads! Apparently most major car brands have shot here at one time or another. Film crews are still coming out here on a regular basis, I'm told.

The other wonderful discovery took me up 11,000 feet into California's White Mountains across from the Sierras on the opposite side of Owens Valley where I'm camped There I found the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, with trees more than 4,000 year old.

It had been my hope three years ago to see the rare bristlecone pine in Great Basin National Park. My failure to do so is the sole time I've been camping where I felt unsafe at a campsite. I had pulled into a campground just outside the national park when one of the employees accused me of disrespecting him (I'd stepped from bright sunlight into a dark office and didn't see him walk by.) 

While I told him that was not my intention, he just couldn't let it go and continued to circle back to my campsite to relitigate. When I realized there was a bar about to open in the campground, I got uneasy enough that I packed up and left.

And I missed out on seeing these trees! They are fascinating! They grow only at high elevation in very thin and rocky soil. The cold, wind and poor soil mean they grow very slowly, creating a dense resinous wood that resists pests, infection, rot and fire.

Their age was only just determined by a scientist in 1954 who was researching old trees. He'd started with the Sequoia, figuring trees that large must be old. They are, but not as old as bristlecones. Edmund P. Schulman found this grove and was stunned when he took a core home to count the rings. 

Besides finding the oldest trees in the Americas, his discovery allowed for improvements in the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. Carbon levels in the earth's atmosphere change periodically which can throw off the measurement.

Scientists can now get a better read on the age of artifacts having compared carbon-14 dating to the ring count. This essentially recalibrated radiocarbon dating for archeologists around the world.

But this isn't really why Moominmama appreciates the bristlecone pine. The trees are beautiful in how dense and twisted they become. There are trees that fuse together, others that twist in place. Portions of the tree can die off, but a branch will continue to grow. They can lose large sections of bark and still survive. And even when they die, unless the ground erodes from under them, they remain standing.

Moominmama hiked the U.S. Forest Service's Methuselah trail, but the famous tree, over 4,600 years old, isn't marked to protect it. Still, I hugged (gently) another substantial tree that I'm estimating at 3,000 years old! I could be off by a thousand years one way or the other. But bucket list, for sure.