Wednesday, January 06, 2010

The Gunga Din Bridge Location (The Alabama Hills Series)

(GPS: N36° 36.650 W118° 07.710)

The above gps coordinates are close. For some reason the coordinates I took and wrote down were way off. I was trying to verify them on Google Earth and noticed something was not right. I have had a few situations in the past where the coordinates I took were not good. There are a few factors in why that can happen, but with Google Earth I can usually verify and give some alternative coordinates. The above should get one there.

I will list the video links at the bottom. This one is easy to find. If you know about The Tall T location I have talked about in the past then this is just right behind it. It is well known, and it is one of the locations that they take you on during one of the tours of the Lone Pine Film Festival.

In the movie, Gunga Din (1939), Carey Grant and Sam Jaffe cross this bridge. Wow! Look at that chasm! The bridge looks broken down and starts to fall apart as Carey walks over it. As they are trying to figure out if they want to cross the elephant "encourages" them to continue to the otherside by stepping on the bridge and tugging on the rope. They cross to the other side.
Surprise, here is our bridge. Yeah, not so dramatic. At the very most, they would have fallen 6-10 feet to the ground.
The movie picture below is done on the left rock formation above.
The videos below do a good job showing that much of the concrete remains can be seen on the rocks. Here is some of them when I walked around them.
Here is where they are getting the "encouragement" to cross.
A couple of things I should point out here. The obvious thing is the concrete at the very bottom of the picture below. That is part of the bridge. The bridge would go out across to the rock formation you see on the other side. However, the rock formation you see behind it and just to the right is what you see in the movie picture above. You can kind of match up the towering rock formation on the left way in the background.
One thing on the videos is I did a slight variation on this one. This was partly experimental to see how I want to do things in the future. The youtube one has a different introduction with pictures and the vimeo one has part of the scene. This is just an experment on my part and not something I intend to do with every video.

The Gunga Din Bridge (Youtube Version)

The Gunga Din Bridge (Vimeo)