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Have you seen the movie "Chinatown"? If yes, then you've heard directly or indirectly of the Owens Valley. Now largely dry there was once an Owens River that carried a great deal of water. But all of that water was lost to Los Angeles around 1910.

This history was in mind but it was not the reason we were in Lone Pine. We had new friends there we wanted to visit and it was a convenient stopover, because it was only a little off our otherwise preferred route from Yosemite to Las Vegas. In fact, way back in 1993 when we had made the route Las Vegas - Death Valley - Los Angeles we had considered, but given up for lack of time (Jan breathed a big sigh of relief then) the idea to swing by Lone Pine and Yosemite before going to Los Angeles. If we had, we might have earlier seen how magnificent the Yosemite falls are when the spring melt infuses them with tremendous size and power.

In this visit we left Yosemite and stopped for a night in Bishop before heading south the final 70 miles. It gave us a chance to partially accustom ourselves to the heat: in Yosemite it had been around 70-80 F in the daytime; now it was 90-100F.

Inyo Mountains Map

Once in Lone Pine we contacted our new friends Elmer and Leonore, uncle and aunt of Cris Vieira Rozenblit whom we had got to know at Moshe and Cris's wedding in New York last fall. That night we went to their house and chatted and chatted. We showed them the videos of the wedding that Gerry had made, still loaded on his notebook. Afterwards they took us out for a really nice steak dinner, it was very generous of them and especially welcome as we had just spent six days eating camp food. After dinner we chatted more, saw their photos, and went off to bed.

Movie Location Map

Just before leaving Lone Pine the next day, we took a drive around the Alabama Hills. Until this visit we had not known that many movies were made there, including Roy Rogers' first starring roll of 1938 and most of the Hopalong Cassidy films, as well as Gunga Din and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The next morning we left Lone Pine for Death Valley and Las Vegas. The route is spectacular. We had the partially snow-covered Sierras to our back for nearly an hour (we can now spot 14,000+ foot Mt Whitney in an instant) and in front of us treeless but majestic mountains. We had thought to camp in the mountains overlooking Death Valley, but all of the sites were treeless and although the temperature wasn't quite as high as in the depths of the valley (where it was 119 F) it was still too hot to survive comfortably without shade. So on we went to Las Vegas.