Alabama Hills / Mobius Arch Loop
Lone Pine · near Lone Pine · Eastern Sierra
Hiking
At a glance
- Difficulty
- easy
- Route type
- loop
- Distance
- 0.6 miles
- Elevation gain
- 45 ft
- Time needed
- day
- Best season
- Spring, fall, winter (best); sunrise year-round · Summer is brutally hot low desert — go at dawn
Permits and booking
- Permit required
- No
- How the permit works
- Free — public BLM land (Alabama Hills National Scenic Area). No day-use permit (only for commercial filming). Dirt roads passable to most cars but washboarded. Watch for hot rock and rattlesnakes.
- How hard the permit is to get
- 0 of 5
What is here
- Features
- Mobius Arch framing Mt Whitney · Film-history landscape (hundreds of Westerns) · Rounded golden granite boulders · Legendary sunrise & astro spot
Worth knowing
- Dogs
- Allowed
- Good for a first timer
- Yes
Hiking detail
- Intl tip
- Come at sunrise — the arch faces the Whitney crest and the light is unforgettable (and the desert is cool). This is low desert, not the mountains: in summer it's brutally hot by mid-morning, so it's a dawn/dusk/off-season destination.
The guide
The postcard of the Eastern Sierra: a short, near-flat loop through the surreal rounded boulders of the Alabama Hills to Mobius…
In the Guidebook
Everything above is yours for free. The written guide to Alabama Hills / Mobius Arch Loop — what it is actually like, and what we would tell a friend before they went — comes with the Guidebook.
Getting there
- Coordinates
- 36.6079, -118.1188