Located in some of the most desolate scenery in the country, Lone Pine, California sits in the Owens Valley between the Inyo Mountains and the John Muir Wilderness in east central California. The complex story of the Southern Pacific's Carson & Colorado and standard-gauge Nevada & California railroads has been told elsewhere in great detail, particularly in David Myrick's indispensable Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California. Suffice it to say that this is not the southern end of the C&C, which bypassed Lone Pine to the east, but the near northern end of the N&C from Mohave.
This is the California Route 136 highway crossing, and it's apparent that even in 1978 the desert was working hard to reclaim the right of way although the tracks were still in place. Today both narrow- and standard-gauge rails are gone.
