Yes, there really was a lone pine. The solitary tree from which the town takes its name is long gone. It once stood at the mouth of Lone Pine Canyon.

Mount Whitney was first climbed on Aug. 18, 1873, by three Lone Pine locals -- Charley Begole, Johnny Lucas and Al Johnson -- who promptly named it Fishermen's Peak, thus incurring the wrath of the famed California Geological Survey team that discovered the peak. That team, in a stroke of world-class brown-nosing, rechristened the mountain after their boss.

Manzanar, the WWII internment camp where 120,000 law-abiding Japanese-American citizens and their immigrant elders were imprisoned, is seven miles north of town on the west side of Highway 395. (Look for the stone sentry huts -- and then look inside them to see some memorable graffiti.) During the war, Manzanar was the largest ''city'' between Reno and Los Angeles -- a city delineated with guard towers and six strands of barbed wire. After years of neglect, the National Park Service has recently taken over the site and added interpretive materials. The mere fact that the Lone Pine and Independence chambers of commerce will even mention Manzanar on their Web sites says a lot about how local attitudes have evolved in recent years.

For PCT hikers exiting to the east side of the Sierra crest on the main Mount Whitney trail, the first commercial source of food and drink in the PCT's Central California sector is the Whitney Portal Store , a few feet from the trail's terminus at the end of Whitney Portal Road. Signature dishes are cheeseburgers, fries and a breakfast special featuring a single flapjack the size of a Cadillac hubcap. We haven't partaken, opting for huge infusions of brew from the store's cooler instead. If you need motivation down the homestretch of the long day, you can see the store below you for the last few miles of the trail. Some people have sworn they could even smell the fries.

The Dow Villa Motel (310 S. Main St., 760 876-5521) is the traditional PCT favorite for lodging in Lone Pine. The large, clean facility (with both "modern" motel wings and an older section behind the office) is laden with enough hiker lore and PCT memories to fill a book. Centrally located on the main drag, it's a genuine piece of East Sierra history, where all the movie crews stayed when they shot Westerns in the Alabama Hills to the west of town. (Some of the big stars signed their names on the old front door frame of the Indian Trading Post on Main Street. At one time this was a big draw for the many German tourists making the National Park circuit from Death Valley and the Grand Canyon up to Yosemite.) Try to get a room in the old hotel section. Alternatively, the AAA TourBook lists five other reputable motels, all on Main.

For dinner, Seasons (206 S. Main St., 760 876-8927) is the call for big steaks, with good service and a decent wine list. The Merry Go Round (212 S. Main St., 760 876-4115) is the other equally nice dinner house. Because they are two doors from each other, it should be no problem for you to eyeball both and make your own call. Most of the other dinner options you'll see in town, such as Pizza Factory ("We toss 'em , they're awesome!") and the usual "family dining" operations, are mediocre choices you're going to be seeing in every trail town for the next 1,000 miles.