RETIREMENT TRIP #6

  ALABAMA HILLS AND JOHN WAYNE'S GHOST 
September 2015  

Driving in the Alabama Hills gives us a spectacular glimpse
at Mount Whitney in the far distance.

Cirrus clouds swirled in wisps overhead at 8:00 a.m., but the sun came out over Mount Whitney as we turned into the Alabama Hills.  The second highest peak in all of North America, highest peak in the contiguous 48 states, glistened in the sun.  It looked like a giant pipe organ lit from above.

Alabama Hills provide the site for more
than 400 movies, most of them Westerns.

Mobius Arch
perfectly frames the peak of distant Mount Whitney.

Andy parked at the trailhead, off an extremely rutted dirt road and all the cutoffs that crisscrossed the old movie locations. Mobius Arch Trail took us a mile into the jumbled rock formations where Roy Rogers and John Wayne filmed the old Westerns.  With the arch as a frame we watched Mount Whitney poke in and out of the high clouds.

Two road graders were smoothing the road when we hiked back to the car.  We waved a thanks and they nodded.  Temperatures were in the comfortable 70’s.

“We have time. Let’s go up the portal,” said Andy, turning onto Whitney Portal Road before I even answered.

“So now is that part of your To Do list?” I asked jokingly. “Climb Mount Whitney?”

Alabama Hills contrast to the foothills
of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Jumbles of rocks offer interesting
formations at the Alabama Hills.

“No,” he answered in all seriousness.  “I don’t really have a bucket list.”

We headed up the portal, 8,631 feet.

“Just think about those poor people who do that Iron Man-type run from Death Valley.  This is the end of it—at the top of the portal.  There’s a village up here, but the run is in the summer—a hundred miles.”

Well banked but with no side protection, Whitney Portal Road
allows for no errors in judgment. 

The road, paved all the way, addressed the climb with few switchbacks.  Signs read “active bear area” everywhere we looked.  Andy had read that the little store at the end of the road in Whitney Portal was THE place to come for pancake breakfast.  But we had had Danish and coffee, and it was already 10 a.m.

I grabbed my jacket to climb up to the waterfall.  It was 57 degrees, but there were easily a hundred cars in the Hiker Lot.  Every year more than 10,000 people make the strenuous 22-mile hike to the summit.

Coming down we could see miles and miles in both directions.
“Look at that!” said Andy.  “There’s nothing in it.  It’s just like Death Valley.”  He was absolutely right.  There wasn’t a sign of settlement.  All the people were up at the portal.

We balance on rocks in the center of a
waterfall at the top of Whitney Portal.

A coyote crossed the road in front of us, but I wasn’t quick enough to get his picture.  He kept moving—focused on breakfast.

Whitney Portal Road was built in 1936 by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), part of Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”  It served as a setting in 1941 for Humphrey Bogart’s classic High Sierra and in Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s film The Long Trailer.  Then Luci surreptitiously fills a travel trailer with her rock collection until it’s too heavy to ascend the grade.

We made it up and down with ease.

“This is the road the Iron Man-type runners use to go from Death Valley to Whitney Portal,” said Andy, turning into the old Owens Lakebed.  The old lake had been sucked totally dry by the city of Los Angeles.  More recently something had to be done to keep the ground damp or it turned to blowing white powdery dust that penetrated everything.

Two charcoal kilns remind visitors of past activity in the area
when miners needed charcoal to process ore.

A historical marker at Cerro Gordo marked the turnoff into the mountains where the Cerro Gordo deposit was discovered by Mexicans in 1865.  The mine eventually produced $17,000,000.00 and for a time was the richest deposit in the U.S.  We remembered going up the dirt road 30 years ago when a woman at the information booth had said it was drivable.  Then our rented car overheated on the steepest turn. Andy ordered us out and away as he carefully maneuvered the vehicle in neutral backwards to a level spot.  Once it cooled, he turned it around.  We never did reach the mine, and we weren’t about to try it in a Toyota Yaris.

A little farther on we crossed the 110-square mile dry Owens Lakebed.  It’s hard to imagine that this dead valley was once a beautiful lake.  But it’s the water and mineral wealth of this place that created the Pueblo of Los Angeles.

We went through Olancha, an 1870 supply depot for Owens Valley settlers.  That was before Los Angeles bled it dry.  Now Olancha has a population of 39.  But just outside of town was a huge plant for Crystal Geyser Spring Water.

A defunct factory, perhaps one that processed salt,
stands idle on the shores of dry Owens Lake.

After all wood near the Cerro Gordo mine had already been cut down, charcoal was prepared in these kilns across the valley and shipped by steamboat across Owens Lake where timber trucks hauled it up to the mine and processing plant.

From Route #395 we could see the dry Owens Lake and a defunct salt mining plant factory near the dry lakebed.

At the intersection Andy turned onto Lubkin Canyon Road.

“This is our last drive into the mountains for today,” he said.

Horseshoe Meadow Road climbs steeply into the mountains only
ten miles from Whitney Portal but with very different scenery.

We were bumping along a one-lane paved trail toward Horseshoe Meadow.  Then the road climbed in steep switchbacks.  Huge lodgepole pines and mountain hemlocks dominated the top.  Signs warned, “Active bear area.”  Unlike Whitney Portal, Cottonwood Pass opened on a spacious flat meadow dotted by trees.

The trail to Horseshoe Meadows passes
through a high, flat forest at more than
9,000 feet in elevation.

The ground, powder dry dust, rose in poufy clouds with each step, as we set out for Horseshoe Meadow.  Totally unlike Whitney Portal, only ten miles away, here the trees spread out with little competition from ground cover.  Those dead ones on the ground showed decay.  There’s much more moisture here than in the Bristlecone Forest.

We hiked in a mile, following a trail that was roughly lined with stones and tree limbs.  A half hour in when the trail reached the rock rubble of the canyon, we turned back, unsure of which direction the branch trails headed.

Standing on the narrow road to Horseshoe Meadows,
the view over the edge is breathtaking and frightening.

Coming down we stopped at the take-off pad for hang gliders.  Now that’s seriously taking your life in your hands.

“If you don’t catch the updraft and get out, you have nothing but rock spires beneath,” said Andy, as we stood on the pad and felt the updraft.   “You have to make it all the way down to the valley.”

The broad pullout 18.3 miles up the canyon is called Walt’s Point.  It was a long way down!

In the back corner of the Dow Villa
Hotel lobby, John Wayne still lives. 

The hills to the east of Lone Pine are huge mounds of packed dirt and rock.   They don’t have the rugged jaggedness of the Sierras, but in the setting sun the greens and reds stood out.  They cast beautiful shadows.  We only went as far as the pavement lasted.

“I’m not getting my clean car dirty,” said Andy.  We had washed it at the coin-op a few hours before.

So tonight as I diligently work, sitting in the lobby of the Dow Villa Hotel where John Wayne stayed when he filmed his Westerns, I wonder about the famous actor and what he would have been doing here.  Surrounded by his pictures and film festival posters, I feel his atmosphere... maybe his ghost... permeate the air.  The hotel amenities? Well, it's a quaint place.  But John Wayne, wherever you are, I'm thinking of you!