Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and the Alabama Hills as 19th-Century India...

Clint Eastwood, Death Valley, Mono Lake...

What did you say your name was again?

I didn't.

The official elevation of Mt. Whitney has changed a number of times over the years, from 14,522 (1881) to 14,515 (1903) to 14,502 (1905) to 14,496 (1928). “You’re looking at the pride of the Sierras, brother—Mt. Whitney,” says the gas station attendant to Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), “14,501 feet above sea level.” In the 1955 remake, I Died a Thousand Times, the fellow says to Jack Palance: “You’re looking at the High Sierras, mister. Mt. Whitney’s in there… 14,496 feet.” AAA puts it down as 14,494. The Park Service has it at 14,491. The Forest Service—the agency that issues the permits necessary to climb the thing—calls it 14,496, or 14,495.

When silent-film director Erich Von Stroheim took his cast and crew into Death Valley in August and September of 1923, as reported at the time by the Inyo Independent, “[t]he temperature was 130 degrees by a properly shaded thermometer, and the heat radiation from the scorching, sun-baked sand of the desert made the trousers of the men so hot as far up as their knees that many were compelled to wrap bandages around their calves to keep the cloth from touching the skin.”