Alabama Hills Mobius Arch
— — a window the wind cut for the mountain.
Not only on a wall.
“A weathered granite arch in the Alabama Hills, west of Lone Pine. Walk the half-mile loop in the dark and the keyhole frames Mount Whitney just before the sun finds it. Photographers come for the minute the alpenglow climbs the Sierra face through the stone: pink, then gold, then white. The hills themselves are old. Granite weathered round while the peaks behind it stayed sharp. Most days nobody is at the arch by seven. The BLM keeps it open, free, and largely to itself.
Alabama Hills Mobius Arch, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Mobius Arch sits in the Alabama Hills west of Lone Pine, California, at roughly 4,800 feet on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. The arch and the rounded granite outcrops around it lie inside the Alabama Hills National Scenic Area, a Bureau of Land Management unit designated by the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act in March 2019. The trailhead is reached from Movie Road, a graded dirt spur off Whitney Portal Road; the loop is roughly six-tenths of a mile and rises only a few dozen feet. Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States at 14,505 feet, rises directly west through the arch's window.
The Alabama Hills are weathered granite plutons that cooled at roughly the same time as the Sierra Nevada peaks behind them, between about 80 and 100 million years ago. The two ranges later uplifted along different faults: the Alabama Hills weathered into rounded boulders, windows, and arches, while the Sierra crest, harder and higher, stayed jagged. The contrast of soft russet humps in front and white granite walls behind is what makes the view through the Mobius Arch read the way it does. The arch itself is a small span carved by wind, water, and freeze-thaw cycles working on a single block, the kind of feature geologists call a window. The hills were named for the CSS Alabama, the Confederate commerce raider, by local prospectors in 1864.
The defining moment is the eastern blue hour, the half hour before the sun clears the Inyo Mountains east of US 395. The arch faces roughly west, framing Mount Whitney and the Sierra crest, so the first warm light from behind the photographer lands on the granite walls across the Owens Valley. Alpenglow on the Sierra east face moves quickly: a wash of pink that turns coral, then gold, then ordinary daylight in under fifteen minutes. The window of useful colour is shorter in summer, when the sun rises north of east and clears the Inyos sooner. Most workshop guides set up by 5:30 a.m. in June and 7 a.m. in December.