FIRST THINGS FIRST: The Alabama Hills are in California, but then you likely know that, if you've ever toodled up through Lone Pine, or down, while road-tripping along Highway 395. For they're quite hard to miss, standing, as they do, between the low sweep of the Owens Valley and the high, touch-the-sky pointy bits of the Sierra Nevada's grand peaks. The Alabama Hills are not like either of those areas, not in the least; rather, they're low-ish, and knobby, and russet brown, and sandstone brown, and they seem as though they might have been constructed by some long-ago mythical creature, like from a Tolkien adventure. This made them a prime setting for Hollywood-made westerns several decades back, and even newer flicks like "Tremors" (itself a few decades old, but still quite the amazing B movie). Today, visitors to the Lone Pine-close area come to hike, explore, take photographs, and be amazed at all of the rock formations found along such a small stretch of land (all things considered). Are you an aficionado of the Alabama Hills? Then saddle up and trot for...
ALABAMA HILLS DAYS 2017, which will spread out, with info, grandeur, and good times, over Saturday, April 8 and Sunday, April 9. Expect to find "(i)nformational exhibits, lectures, interpretative tours, hikes, and more" during the weekend-long tribute to the "incredible geologic area." Also neat to see and important, too, in terms of the modern-era of the hills? The Lone Pine Museum of Western Film History, which covers oodles of the film work done in the Alabama Hills. If you can't make the early-April party, make it to the Alabama Hills someday soon, for few natural wonders in the Golden State, or anywhere, are as fantastical and storybook-cool. Truly, did some magical resident make this his personal home long ago. Well, no, but the hills do inspire imaginative flights of fancy, and a love of nature's vast permutations.
