The Red Hills is a unique area in Tuolumne County known for its serpentine soil and pine/buckbrush chaparral. The Sierra Railway snakes through the area. That fact and its ‘badlands’ look has led to numerous film productions, most notably the town and train scenes for Back to the Future III, the opening of Petticoat Junction, and the train scene in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
There are few places as beautiful and untouched as the High Sierra, and the drive along the Sonora Pass is a truly spectacular way to witness its beauty. Sonora Pass is at 9624 feet (2933 meters), is very steep, narrow, and winding. Like its neighbor on Hwy 120, Tioga Pass, this route is generally closed from November to May.
These pictures are all taken on the Western slope from between Kennedy Meadows and Sonora Pass. Most of these photos are of the dramatic canyon-like area that encompasses Chipmunk Flat, Deadman’s Creek, and a zigzag Highway 108 in walls of granite.
Railtown is truly a one-of-a-kind facility. Not only does it have the oldest roundhouse this side of the Mississippi, it houses three steam locomotives, the oldest a 1891 Rogers class locomotive known as “The Movie Train”. Sierra #3 has been seen in over 200 productions, including the very fist ‘talkie’ filmed on-location, 1929s The Virginian, the Western classic High Noon, TV classics Rawhide, Petticoat Junction, and Wild Wild West, Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and Unforgiven, and Back to the Future III. All can be run along the 40+ miles of the Sierra Railroad between Jamestown and Oakdale, featuring varying terrain from plains, rolling hills, oak savannah, the high chapparal badlands called the Red Hills, and into the pines. If you’d like to visit Railtown, do it quick and visit this website.
Columbia State Historic Park is the best-preserved California Gold Rush town, with six blocks of original brick buildings (30 in all) dating back to the 1850s and 1860s.