Alabama Hills Road, Lone Pine, California 1972

This striking photograph captures the approach into the famous Alabama Hills, with the jagged granite spine of the Sierra Nevada rising sharply behind. Mount Whitney—towering at 14,505 feet—dominates the horizon, its snow-capped summit gleaming under the clear high-desert sky. The contrast between the dry sagebrush foreground and the icy blue mountains beyond is classic Owens Valley scenery: dramatic, open, and filled with quiet grandeur.

By the early 1970s, this view was already familiar to millions, even if most people never knew where it was. The Alabama Hills served as a natural backlot for Hollywood for more than half a century, appearing in countless Westerns, war films, and adventure serials. Everything from Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger to scenes from How the West Was Won, Twelve O’Clock High, and later Tremors were staged among the rounded, weather-worn orange rock formations just ahead.

In 1972, the road was narrower and quieter than it is today, used mostly by locals, occasional tourists, and location scouts searching for the next cinematic canyon or cowboy battleground. The small wooden sign on the right—simple and easy to miss—points toward “Alabama Hills Recreation Lands,” long before the area gained formal protection or became the well-known landscape photography destination it is now.