We enjoyed our February trip so much that we decided to return to the Alabama Hills for 10 days in March. Free camping in the Alabama Hills and the warm weather we enjoyed in February made it an easy choice.
This trip was more about relaxing and enjoying the scenery. We found a great campsite behind a rock formation that hid us from the main road but provided a full view of Lone Pine Peak and Whitney in front of us. It was a million-dollar view, and all we had to do was walk out the front door.
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| Our Campsite | View from our Front Door |
Our stay started with a little rain and some overnight snow, but quickly returned to clear, blue skies every day. That made it very comfortable (except those sunrise mornings when it was 24), but it didn't add any color for sunrises or sunsets. I still got up most mornings for sunrise to get familiar with my new Canon 7D Mark ii, but Carol generally stayed comfortably in bed. She wasn't getting up and standing in the cold if it wasn't going to be a good sunrise.
On Sunday, we explored a wash that parallels Movie Road and eventually drains into Lone Pine Creek. The wash leads back toward the Sierras and wanders between the ridges that make up this portion of the Alabama Hills. We normally shoot sunrise from the road above this area, but this time we shot along the wash and back toward the east. We had a completely new perspective on the area.
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My main goal
for the trip was to shoot the moon setting over Mt. Whitney at sunrise. With The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE) and Google Earth,
that should be pretty easy. The challenge is that the White Mountains in the east delay the sunrise by 40 minutes, and the summits
of the Sierras makes the sunset nearly an hour earlier than all the software predictions. It turns out that the experience of being
there is still necessary to get an exact sunrise and sunset time. The delay in the sun topping the White Mountains was just enough
that the moon set a few minutes before the sun hit Mt. Whitney. It was so close....
We've been coming to the Alabama Hills since the early 90's. Although the landscape hasn't changed at all, the popularity of the area and our camping has changed dramatically. One afternoon, we followed a tour bus of Chinese tourists leaving Lone Pine and driving up into the hills. We couldn't believe it. They parked at the Mobius Arch parking lot and hiked out to see the arch. A tour bus! When we first started looking for "The Arch" not even the volunteers in the visitor center could provide directions for finding it (at least they weren't telling anyone). I had a picture from a Sierra Club appointment book that Wendell, Caroline, Carol, and I used to match features until we finally found it amidst a ridge of rocks. It took all morning, and we probably covered a couple of square miles before we found it. Now, there is a marked parking lot and a trail right to the arch. Busloads of tourists stop there each week.
We stayed at the original Dow Villa Hotel in town or camped in the back of my Ford Ranger on our early trips to the Alabama Hills. Food was predictably simple on those first camping trips. This trip our menu included orange chicken, shrimp scampi, apple roasted pork with cherry balsamic glaze, meatloaf, chili, and two trips to the Copper Top BBQ in Big Pine. With our solar panels, we had nearly all the comforts of home. And we had that gorgeous view of the Sierras any time we walked out the door!
This trip also gave us the chance to check out our map skills and electronic devices for the New Mexico trip. Like New Mexico, we didn't have Internet service in most areas of the Alabama Hills. Our "test" helped us decide what maps, waypoints, etc., we would have to store off-line on our devices while hiking in the New Mexico badlands. There are no roads and no trails in these badlands, so we need a means to find the best features and not get lost trying to find our way back to the Explorer. It's a good thing we had the trial run, because we discovered we needed to save a lot more information to our iPhones, tablet, and GPS. We took far too much for granted. Wandering around in trailless areas can be very confusing when you're looking for a single arch or feature; even in a small area like the Alabama Hills. The badlands in New Mexico will stretch for miles and will provide another level of difficulty.
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