When the Movies Came Up the Mountain

Well now. I'm Boone — Boone Merrick — and I tell the stories on this road, the ones that don't fit on the historical markers. And the first one I've got for you is about that big timbered inn you just passed in the village, and the strange years when this little fishing town was Hollywood's back lot.

Picture the nineteen thirties. Down south, the studios are churning out Westerns and mountain pictures, and they have a problem: Los Angeles doesn't look like the Alps, and it surely doesn't look like Wyoming. But three hundred miles up Highway Three Ninety-Five? Granite peaks, pine forests, four lakes in a row, and a Bavarian-style inn with a great stone hearth already standing there like a set someone forgot to strike. The studios found June Lake in the twenties and kept coming back for decades.

The crews stayed at the Heidelberg. The stars stayed at the Heidelberg. The local story — and old-timers here will still tell it to you — is that on a winter night in the thirties you could walk into that dining room and find half a call sheet drying their boots at the fire.

And the pictures got made. Henry Fonda came up here for The Return of Frank James, playing Frank on the run with these very mountains standing in for the outlaw West — scenes of that picture were shot right on June Lake and over at Convict Lake. Film crews shot on the FROZEN lake in winter, with the inn serving as base camp, bunkhouse and saloon all at once.

Think about what that meant for a town of a few hundred souls in the Depression. The rest of the country is standing in bread lines — and up here, a studio convoy rolls in with carpenters, wranglers, camera crews, and a payroll, all of them needing beds, breakfasts, firewood, boat rentals and somebody local who knows where the light hits the water at seven in the morning. Hollywood money helped carry this valley through the thirties the way the dam money had carried it through the teens. The town has always had exactly one industry — being itself — and it has sold that to anglers, film crews and skiers in turn without ever once changing the product.

Now here's the part I like. Most towns that Hollywood discovers get eaten by it — they build big, they chase the money, they end up a theme park of themselves. June Lake took the studios' money for room and board, waved politely when the trucks rolled out, and went right back to being a fishing town. The inn is still there. The lake still freezes. And the mountains never did learn they were supposed to be Wyoming.

Quinn's got the road from here. I'll be back at the tramway — that one's got sweat in it.