The Alabama Hills are a range of hills and unique rock formations that we visited on Thursday morning and have been for a very long time a popular filming location for television and movie productions, especially Westerns set in an archetypally rugged, isolated setting.
Why the out-of-place name “Alabama?” Because the nearby hills were named for the CSS Alabama, a Confederate warship deployed during the American Civil War. When news of the ship's exploits reached prospectors in California sympathetic to the Confederates, they named many mining claims after the ship, and the name came to be applied to the entire range.
The place became an ideal place for Hollywood to shoot films. The first known movies to be filmed there are the lost films Water, Water Everywhere and Cupid, the Cowpuncher, both shot in 1919 and released in early 1920.
Since then, hundreds of movies have been filmed there. After that it was a long, scenic, turning, twisting, scary-narrow, with few guard rail protection and a never ending mountain road across to Backersville, followed by a tamer itinerary to the Pacific with plenty of agriculture and oil drilling to complete the scene.
The Pacific Coast would be where our journey would stop for the day as we ran out of continent, in Cambria, a small coastal town on Route 101. A full day of driving, sightseeing and fun.
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