Enjoy Breathtaking Landscapes At A Popular Filming Location In California's Desert

You may not know the small-town gem of Lone Pine by name, but if you're a movie fan, you might know the surrounding hills by sight. The Alabama Hills — which are actually located in California — have appeared in over 400 films. In "Django Unchained," they doubled for Texas. In "Iron Man," they stood in for Afghanistan. They even appeared in "Gladiator," where they blended in with backdrops across the Roman Empire as the wounded Maximus (Russell Crowe) made his way home. These are just a few well-known 21st-century movies that showcase a location with a place in Hollywood history going back to 1920.

Situated at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Alabama Hills became a popular filming location due to their natural beauty and relative proximity to Los Angeles, less than a four-hour drive away. In 1919, when silent film star Fatty Arbuckle came to town to shoot "The Round-Up," it put Lone Pine and the hills on the movie map. A century later, in 2019, Congress designated the hills a National Scenic Area, so they're now public land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. That means you can camp here with a free permit.

Just be sure a monstrous Graboid doesn't tunnel up from the ground to eat you, as this part of California also appeared in the creature feature, "Tremors," not to mention many old Westerns. You can learn more about its contribution to the Western genre in Lone Pine, which holds the only museum in America dedicated to the genre. Right outside town, you can take a self-guided tour of film sites and interesting rock formations along Movie Road.

The very first shot in writer-director Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" shows a bulbous rock formation in the Alabama Hills (which take their name from a Civil War battleship). The camera lingers on the rocks as the opening credits roll, with the names of Oscar winners Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, and Leonardo DiCaprio appearing in succession. Then the camera pans right and follows the scarred back of Foxx's titular Django through the desert.

The Alabama Hills are near the colorful Death Valley National Park, and it's no surprise that a film historian like Tarantino would be drawn to this rugged landscape, the way so many other Hollywood directors were. The Museum of Western Film History likens Lone Pine to a showbiz version of Cooperstown, where the National Baseball Hall of Fame is located. "Django Unchained" has since returned to screen in Lone Pine at its annual film festival, but when you visit the Alabama Hills, you're not only retracing Django's footsteps. You're also tailing the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Bret Maverick, and the all-star cast of "How the West Was Won."

The Lone Pine Chamber of Commerce offers a movie location map to guide you through the Alabama Hills. Beyond the Western genre, the hills have shown up in classics like "High Sierra," the film noir that made Humphrey Bogart a star, and have represented locations as diverse as India, as explained on a plaque that marks the shooting location for the Cary Grant-led adventure film, "Gunga Din." 

The highest-grossing film franchise of all time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, also began in the Alabama Hills. The Museum of Western Film History provides directions to where the opening scene of the first MCU flick, "Iron Man," was shot. It's the scene where Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is ambushed in a Humvee (or "Fun-vee," as he calls it). The movie returns to the hills later as Stark presides over a missile test there.

With their frequent movie appearances, the Alabama Hills have made a name for themselves as "Hollywood's backlot." However, if you're ready to go beyond superheroes and Old West mythology, you can explore the natural splendor of the hills by hiking dirt paths, like the Arch Loop Trail. If you stop and smell the sagebrush, so to speak, you might begin to appreciate why this sparse yet beautiful terrain is important to the cultural heritage of the indigenous Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Tribe (who still call it home).

At the entrance to the hills, Nightmare Rock has been painted to resemble a phantasmagorical face, like something out of a peyote dream. The Mobius Arch forms a kind of oval rock window, through which you can see Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous United States. There's also a misshapen Heart Arch and a rock dedicated to the singing cowboy, Gene Autry. (It too appeared in "Django Unchained.") At night, you can enjoy stargazing in the Alabama Hills, and if you've still got movie stars on the brain afterward, you can head to LA and explore more iconic filming locations in California.