Lone Pine, named for a towering pine that stood over the town in the 1800s, views of Mt. Whitney’s 14,496-foot summit steal the show. Beyond Lone Pine’s city center is the Whitney Portal Trail that leads to the summit of Mt. Whitney, the tallest mountain in the continental U.S.
Back in the mid-1800's, the town of Lone Pine was founded to supply local miners with provisions. Farmer and ranchers followed soon after, and after that, the Carson Colorado Railroad pulled into town.
In the 1920s cinematographers discovered that the nearby Alabama Hills were a picture-perfect movie set for Westerns, and stars from Gary Cooper to Gregory Peck could often be spotted swaggering about town. Starting in 1920 with the Western film The Round-Up, Lone Pine and its environs have appeared as the backdrop for genre classics starring Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, and John Wayne as well as less successful revisionist Western fare like Kevin Costner’s The Postman and 2013’s box office bomb The Lone Ranger.
