Alabama Hills

Where it sits. The Alabama Hills are a field of rounded granite boulders and low outcrops spread across about 120 square kilometres of the Owens Valley floor, immediately west of the town of Lone Pine in Inyo County, California. They sit at roughly 1,500 m, and directly behind them the Sierra Nevada rises in one of the steepest escarpments in North America to Mount Whitney at 4,421 m - the highest point in the contiguous United States, 16 km away and 3,000 m above the boulders. That juxtaposition of warm orange rock in the foreground against a snow-covered granite wall is what has drawn cameras here for a century. The hills were named by Confederate-sympathising prospectors in the 1860s after the raider CSS Alabama.

What built it. Counterintuitively, the rounded hills and the jagged peaks behind them are much the same rock - both are granitic, both around 80 to 100 million years old. The difference is weathering. The Alabama Hills have spent their history at low elevation in a warm, dry climate, where chemical weathering along joints rounds the corners and leaves boulder piles and arches. The Sierra crest has been carved by glaciers and frost into edges. The Owens Valley between them is a deep fault-bounded trough that dropped as the Sierra rose, and the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake - one of the largest in California's recorded history - left a visible fault scarp just north of town, along with a mass grave for the sixteen dead.

On screen. Filming began here in 1920 with the silent western The Round-Up, and since then more than 400 features, over a hundred television productions and an uncountable number of commercials have used these rocks. The list runs from wall-to-wall B-westerns of the 1930s and 1940s - Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers - to major productions that used the hills as somewhere else entirely.

• Gunga Din (1939), where the hills stood in for the North-West Frontier of India, with a full village set built on the flats
• Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and The Tall T (1957), westerns using the boulders and the Sierra wall
• How the West Was Won (1962), sections of the epic's western sequences
• Tremors (1990), whose fictional town of Perfection sits among these rocks
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Gladiator (2000), Iron Man (2008) - the Afghanistan ambush - and Django Unchained (2012)

What you actually see today. Movie Road runs north from Whitney Portal Road about 4 km west of Lone Pine and is the spine of the area: a graded dirt road, passable in an ordinary car, threading between the formations with informal pull-offs everywhere. The Museum of Western Film History on Main Street in Lone Pine, opened in 2006, holds costumes, vehicles, scripts and set pieces from productions shot here, including material donated by Quentin Tarantino from Django Unchained, and it publishes the self-guided map that identifies specific filming spots. The Mobius Arch Loop, a 1 km walk off Movie Road, reaches a slender arch that frames Mount Whitney's crest when you crouch at the right angle - the single most reproduced photograph in the Owens Valley. The Lone Pine Film Festival has run every October since 1990.

Practical notes. The area is public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and was designated the Alabama Hills National Scenic Area in March 2019. Dispersed camping is allowed but now requires a permit in designated areas, and the free-for-all of previous decades has been curtailed after serious damage; fires are restricted and human waste has become a real problem. There is no water anywhere in the hills. Cross-country walking is easy but the boulder field is disorienting - it is a genuinely common experience to lose track of which pile of granite the car is behind.

Getting there and timing. Lone Pine is on U.S. 395, 340 km north of Los Angeles and 190 km south of Mammoth Lakes; the drive from Las Vegas via Death Valley is about 400 km and spectacular. Spring and autumn are the seasons, with daytime highs of 18C to 28C and snow still on the Sierra crest through June. Summer regularly exceeds 38C on the valley floor, though Whitney Portal Road climbs 2,000 m in 20 km to genuine alpine air. Winter days are cold, bright and empty. First light on the Sierra wall, seen from Movie Road, is the reason photographers set alarms here, and the alpenglow lasts barely ten minutes.