The Thunder Mesa Hideout (The Alabama Hills Series)

We cannot let Uncle Ben (Gabby Hayes) get killed two blogs back without having Hopalong Cassidy avenge him. This one will connect the last two blogs. The first one showed you where Hoppy was resting, but then finds out Uncle Ben is dead nearby. The clue written in the sand by Uncle Ben was Thunder Mesa. In the real world, the picture they show in the movie is a well known Red Rock Canyon rock formation. However, Hoppy ends up taking his posse about 1/2 to 1 mile south of where he was resting to where the Thunder Mesa hideout was.

Here is Hoppy leading the posse on the assault of the Thunder Mesa hideout.
Something like this:
Now I will connect this to the last blog. This was the picture I used to show the mine that would have been on the slight incline in the middle of the picture.
Now looking at the movie picture below can you see where the hide out would be in the picture above?

I do not have any pictures with the exact camera angle as the one above, so I just took my picture above into photoshop, zoomed in, and cut out the part I wanted. The hideout would have been right next to where the rock(s) is that look like someone folding their hands together in prayer.

And, just because I am in the mood...they never knew what hit them.

So, this is not rocket science. Once you find the patterns of the rocks you start seeing them again and again. In this case, when I originally wanted to find this one years back, I saw it used in the movie I referred to in the last blog. I showed in that blog a feature that helped me figure that mine location out. In the past I have pointed out that sometimes watching other movies helps one figure out other movie locations.
This was the 1st of 66 Hopalong Cassidy movies. A good percentage of them were filmed in the Alabama Hills. It seems to me about half of them were, I used to have stats on this in notes I was taking, but I would have to look. So, the Hoppy movies are usually good examples of filming in the Alabama Hills. At one point I had most of the general areas used listed in notes I had taken. I was going to go out and start then listing them all on here. I decided against this mainly because I would rather mix in other movies to show some of these areas.

Shootout at Thunder Mesa (Youtube Version)

Shootout at Thunder Mesa (Vimeo Version)