Alabama Hills, California – Desert Night Sky
By Brad Karelius, East Sierra Branch
The green overhead street sign for Mount Whitney Portals swings wildly in the November wind, as I wait at the signal on Highway 395 in Lone Pine, California. To my right are local restaurants: Seasons, Merry Go Round, and The Grill – all of which radiate hospitality. They are jammed with skiers heading to and returning from Mammoth Mountain, two hours to the north. My Honda Pilot shudders in the buffeting blasts of wind. With a green light I turn left heading toward Mount Whitney and the Sierra Nevada. Away from the town’s lights, dense darkness descends. Suddenly a tumbleweed the size of a Volkswagen Beetle barrels across the road in front of me.
The road twists and turns following Lone Pine Creek. Denuded cottonwood and willow trees bend in the whistling wind. More debris flies by. I think to myself that maybe I should not be on this road in such an intense desert windstorm.
I enter the narrows of the Alabama Hills, and the road climbs higher. Gnarled, weirdly shaped boulders cast haunting shadows in my headlights. Having driven this road many times before, I look for familiar clues to Movie Road. I come upon an open plateau where the wind is blocked out by the hills and rocks and there I see the sign for Movie Road, turn right and continue north on a half-mile paved section leading to a wide dirt road. I jam on my brakes as a mother doe and two fawn dash across the road.
I might as well park here, and I step out into the dark night. This point is a thousand feet higher than Lone Pine; the town’s lights are blocked by the Alabama Hills and I am standing on a plateau on a moonless night. The car and landscape dissolve into the darkness. I am unable to see my feet. Facing east, I see the starry night sky on both sides of me, half a circle. Without reference to the ground or the horizon, I seem to be surrounded by night sky, brilliant, twinkling diamonds of light scattered about me. I feel I am being lifted up into the sky, plunging into the vast Milky Way. The more I focus on the brighter stars, the more the fainter ones become clear. Millions! Infinity. This is a thin place between heaven and earth, between reason and wondrous mystery.
Excerpted from Desert Spirit Places: The Sacred Southwest
by Brad Karelius (2018).