Алабама төбелері: Калифорнияның табиғи көрікті жері

Hills and rock formations in California, U. S.
the unincorporated community

The Alabama Hills are a range of hills and rock formations near the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in the Owens Valley, west of Lone Pine in Inyo County, California. Though geographically separate from the Sierra Nevada, they are part of the same geological formation.

Dedicated on May 24, 1969, the Alabama Hills were originally managed by the U. S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as the Alabama Hills Recreation Area. In March 2019, the U. S. congress redesignated the area as the Alabama Hills National Scenic Area as part of the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act.

The Alabama Hills location as a gateway to Mt. Whitney and the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains has made dispersed camping very popular with the overlanding and RV communities. The region's fragile ecosystem and increasing numbers of visitors to Alabama Hills has prompted the Bureau of Land Management in its most recent guide to the area to discourage this practice asking visitors to, "Camp in campgrounds. Using campgrounds reduces the number of vehicles so that the great views are not blocked. Use the restroom in town or at nearby campgrounds. If that isn't an option, bury human waste in catholes 6 inches (15.24 centimetres) deep and 200 feet (61 metres) away from water, trails, and camp. There are no restrooms in the hills Camping in campgrounds helps maintain the area's great scenery and recreational opportunities. City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power lands in the area are open for day use only."

The rounded contours of the Alabamas contrast with the sharp ridges of the Sierra Nevada to the west. Though this might suggest that they formed from a different orogeny, the Alabamas are the same age as the Sierra Nevada. The difference in wear can be accounted for by different patterns of erosion. Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States, towers several thousand feet above this low range, which itself is 1500 feet (457 m) above the floor of Owens Valley. However, gravity surveys indicate that the Owens Valley is filled with about 10000 feet (3048 m) of sediment and that the Alabamas are the tip of a very steep escarpment. This feature may have been created by many earthquakes similar to the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake which, in a single event, caused a vertical displacement of
There are two main types of rock exposed at Alabama Hills. One is an orange, drab weathered metamorphosed volcanic rock that is 150200 million years old. The other type of rock exposed here is 8285 million year old biotite monzogranite which weathers to potato shaped large boulders, many of which stand on end due to spheroidal weathering acting on many nearly vertical joints in the rock. Dozens of natural arches are among the main attractions at the Alabama Hills. They can be accessed by short hikes from the Whitney Portal Road, the Movie Flat Road and the Horseshoe Meadows Road. Among the notable features of the area are: Mobius Arch, Lathe Arch, the Eye of Alabama and Whitney Portal Arch.

The Alabama 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. When the Alabama was finally sunk off the coast of Normandy by the USS Kearsarge in 1864, prospectors sympathetic to the Union named a mining district, a mountain pass, a mountain peak, and a town after the Kearsarge. Since then, hundreds of movies have been filmed there, including: Gunga Din, Iron Man, The Walking Hills, Yellow Sky, Springfield Rifle, The Violent Men, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Monolith Monsters, the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott "Ranown" cycle, How the West Was Won, Joe Kidd, Saboteur, and Django Unchained. The 1990 movie, Tremors, starring Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire was made in the Alabamas. Many episodes of various television shows have also been shot there, e. g.: The Gene Autry Show, The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, and Annie Oakley. Nearly every major Western actor of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s rode their horses amid these rocks: John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, Robert Mitchum, William Boyd, Roy Rogers, and many others. A full scale Graboid underground monster that Kevin Bacon battled in Ron Underwood's Tremors as well as a partial recreation of the film's sets is on display in the museum. Every Fall the Lone Pine Film History Museum hosts the Lone Pine Film Festival, which bills itself as "the only film festival on location", because festival goers watch films shot in the area and then take tours into the Alabama Hills to see the very spots where the scenes they just watched were filmed. On a clear night with no moon, a visitor with good, dark adapted vision may see the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies with the unaided eye; the central Milky Way appears highly structured under these conditions.