Father Junipero Serra had already founded a series of Missions on the Western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, along the Valleys and near the California coast, between the years 1769 and 1784, when he died at age 70 at the Mission San Carlos Borlemeo, in Carmel, California.

Thirty-six years later, the first trappers appeared along the Eastern Sierras, and thirty-nine years after them, in 1859, the first substantial numbers of white settlers arrived in and around the Owens Valley, where the Alabama Hills guarded the Southern Gateway.

Even as the Civil War was beginning in the East, War broke out near Lone Pine between white settlers and the local Paiute tribe, over food shortages during the harsh winter of 1861. The skirmishes ended the following year with the destruction of the Paiute's remaining food storage and their banishment to reservations over a hundred miles to the Southwest, at Fort Tejon, South of what is now Bakersfield, California.

The hills were given their name in the mid 1860s during the Civil War, by a group of miners with Southern sympathies. The hills are named for the C.S.S. Alabama, the "Confederate States Ship" that raided from Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, across the North Atlantic to Europe and the Horn of Africa, sinking or capturing 60 Union naval vessels, including the U.S.S. Hatteras.

At the time of the Alabama's loss to the U.S.S. Kearsarge, near Cherbourg, France, on June 19, 1864, a group of miners with Northern sympathies countered by naming a town, mining district and nearby mountain peak, "Kearsarge."

One keeps guard on the other as time, old soldiers, ghosts and history move on.

Toward the end of the 19th Century and at the beginning of the 20th, the Eastern Sierras were the frequent subject of naturalist John Muir, who described their beauty in divinely inspirational terms as the "Range of Light."

With the Alabama Hills at Lone Pine in the foreground on the Eastern side, and the tallest peak in the lower 48 States -- Mt. Whitney, at 14,496 feet -- as a backdrop just to their West, the rocky area became a gateway to wilderness trails in the Sierras on the West, the White Mountains on the East, and the entire Owens Valley and Mid-Eastern California, from Lone Pine in the South to Topaz, in the North, at the Nevada State line.

Today US Highway 395 strolls past this remarkably colorful set of foothills, grand in their own right and made even grander by the rock curtain of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as they run a North-South parallel to the brevity of the Alabama Hills, the Sierras themselves representing a longer, natural border line between the lengths of California and Nevada states.

Along the length of "Highway 395," old fenceposts, corrals, barns, buildings, rusted out relics like automobiles, trucks and tractors, old Steam locomotives on display, mid 19th Century and early 20th Century Court Houses and buildings, wild burros and herds of Elk, Brown Bears in the canyons foraging for food, trails that take you on a wilderness journey to Mt. Whitney and hidden places in the Sierras, the waterfalls near Mammoth Lakes and Mammoth Mountain, the Bristlecone Pine Forest east of Independence, the old West mining town of Bodie, the Devil's Postpile National Monument, snaking rivers and creeks, lakes filled by the runoff from Winter snows, the Owens Gorge near Bishop, the Paiute and Shoshone Indian reservations and colonies, the rodeo grounds at Bishop and Bridgeport, prehistoric Mono Lake, farmlands, marshlands, pine forests, airports, the Paiute Palace Casino...

...a place where movie history was once made, where movie legends like Tom Mix, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Ida Lupino, Arthur Kennedy and Humphrey Bogart, have crossed trails with modern day actors like Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, Fred Ward, Kevin Bacon, Michael Gross, Dolph Lundgren, George Segal, Geoffrey Lewis, Michelle Phillips and Alec Baldwin.

The Alabama Hills are the Southern Gateway to all of these diversities and more.

An overnight stay in Lone Pine during the trip home from Reno, Nevada, revealed them to me at sunrise, not too long ago...

Alabama Hills Gallery