This feature was created by the same fault system as the 1872 Lone Pine earthquake which, in a single event, caused a vertical displacement of 6 to 8 feet (1.8 to 2.4 m).

[9] The Alabama Hills are a popular filming location for television and movie productions, especially Westerns set in an archetypical rugged, isolated milieu.

The oldest surviving film shot in the hills is The Round-Up (1920), starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, which includes a cameo from his friend, Buster Keaton.

[10] Since then, hundreds of movies have been filmed there, including: Gunga Din, The Walking Hills, Yellow Sky, Springfield Rifle, The Violent Men, Bad Day at Black Rock, the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott "Ranown" cycle, How the West Was Won, Joe Kidd, Saboteur, and Django Unchained, Tremors, Iron Man, and The Monolith Monsters.

Exhibits include the Dr. King Schultz dentist wagon from Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, the 1937 Plymouth Humphrey Bogart drove in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra.

[13] On a clear night with no moon, a visitor with good, dark-adapted vision may see the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies with the unaided eye; the central Milky Way appears highly structured under these conditions.