My wife and I were climbing in the Alabama Hills, as we do many an evening after we finish our work. It’s cooler then as the long shadows from Mt. Whitney and Williamson splay across the monzonite domes, slowly chilling the rock that has been baking in the summer sun. Topping out on a dome, sometimes it’s very possible to feel as though you’ve landed in Joshua Tree minus the rangers, the picnic tables, the expensive camping, and, well, the Joshua trees. Some have gone so far as to call the Alabama Hills the “poorman’s Joshua Tree” which is sort of true considering the general lack of good crack climbing and the non-existent entry fees. But after climbing here a few years, we’ve begun to question the wisdom of the maxim, not to mention question whether we want to ever go back to Joshua Tree when the Alabama Hills is, for lack of a better term, so much a wonderland of rocks. 

Mostly comprised of sport climbs on cinematically beautiful domes (enough westerns, car commercials, and music videos have been filmed here to spool across the Sierra Crest several times over), the Alabama Hills is slab climbing at its near best. Some call it crumbly choss. And yes there is a bit of that. Nevertheless, we find ourselves continually drawn back to the sharp edges of granite plates exfoliating into the desert scrub.

So here we are in the Loaf area, so-called because Meatloaf filmed a music video while at the height of his fame and limitless passion to rock! with sweaty abandon. I unpack the rope bag and leave it on the ground underneath the climb when I realize I’ve forgotten the water. No big deal: sometimes it’s more than practical to belay on the tailgate of your truck with a cold drink in the other hand. While I fetch water, my wife Caroline explores the base of the domes, ticking off climbs she intends to do.

When I get back, she picks up the rope bag and carries it from one dome to the next, to a climb that looks good to her. She ties in, chalks her hands, and begins climbing. After clipping three or four bolts, I look down at my feet — clad in my usual summer attire of snake-proof sandals, mind you — and see a western diamondback slither out of the rope bag.

I yell up at Caroline: “Clappeschlonge, Clappeschlonge,” a word I recently acquired in her quest to teach me her native language. Stepping backwards a few feet, I count seven rattles on its tail. But the “clapping snake” (rough translation) is well behaved, crawling casually away into a stand of bushes. He’d gotten a free ride in the rope bag, carried by Caroline next to her chest. Without plunging too far into anthropomorphic serpent behavior, the snake probably thought the rope was a skinny 10 mm cousin of his and crawled in to say hi. As with most things, climbing’s most horrendous moments are experienced in hindsight.

The Alabama Hills are like that; the good and bad sink in later. It’s a wild paradise despite its John Wayne reputation of shattered beer bottles, ATVers dusting up the roads, and above, F-16 fighter jets that dogfight in and around the clouds. On one climb in the Ghosts area called Elephant Hunting (5.10b) you smear and pinch on small craters produced by men pretending to be movie stars pretending to be cowboys shooting at the wall with rifles.

Late evening, as usual, finds us squeezing one more climb out of the dusky light. Bats swoop by in the utterly quiet air and always a great horned owl can be heard asking the question of who we are. By then we know it’s time to shed our harnesses and grab a beer out of the cooler before heading home to Big Pine for homemade burritos.

Or not. The other night, post snake encounter and under a full moon, we kept climbing. I’ll venture going up the Shark Fin Arête (5.7) to peer at Mt. Whitney lit up in lunar light is one of the best things one can do on the Eastside. From here the Owens Valley, flanked by the White/Inyo Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, stretches for as far as the eye can see by the moonlight. And time, finally, for that midnight burrito.