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Alabama Hills are a rocky formation on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the Owens Valleymarker of Californiamarker, near Lone Pine, Californiamarker. Though geographically considered a range of hills, geologically they are a part of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management as the Alabama Hills Recreation Area, they are protected. 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 nearby Sierras . The difference in wear can be accounted for by different patterns of erosion.

Mount Whitneymarker, the tallest mountain in the contiguous United Statesmarker, towers several thousand feet above this low range, which itself is above the floor of Owens Valley. However, gravity surveys indicate that the Owens Valley is filled with about 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 earthquakemarker which, in a single event, caused a vertical displacement of 15–20 feet.




Typical rocks in Alabama Hills
The Alabama Hills were named for CSS Alabamamarker. When news of the Confederate warship's exploits reached prospectors in California sympathetic to the Confederates, they named many mining claims after her, and the name came to be applied to the entire mountain range. Then, when Alabama was sunk off the coast of Normandy by USS Kearsarge in 1864, prospectors sympathetic to the North named a mining district, mountain pass, a peak, and a town after Kearsarge.

Film location

The Alabama Hills are a popular location for television and movie productions (especially Westerns) set in an archetypical "rugged" environment. Since the early 1920s, 150 movie and about a dozen television shows have been filmed here, including Tom Mix films, Hopalong Cassidy films, The Gene Autry Show, and The Lone Ranger. Classics such as Gunga Din, Springfield Rifle, and How the West Was Won, as well as more recent productions such as Tremors and Joshua Tree, were filmed at sites known as Movie Flats and Movie Flat Road. In Gladiator, actor Russell Crowe rides a horse in front of the Alabamas, with Mount Whitney in the background, for a scene presumably set in Spainmarker. Star Trek Generations was filmed here in addition to Overton, Nevadamarker and Paramount Studios. More recently, many parts of the films Ironman and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen were filmed here.



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