By about noon today we quit being layabouts and took off for an excursion around the Lone Pine area. The western horizon is filled up with the Sierras and Mount Whitney is front and center. Whitney is hard to ignore.
We crossed US-395 from our RV park and drove up Whitney Portal Road which ascends from about 4000′ elevation to 8200′. Anybody that wants to go higher will be walking. Driving all the way to the top of the road confirms my theory that the closer you get to a mountain, the less you will see. The drive up and back is a bit exhilarating because the road is steep and curvy along the edge of the massive rock mountains but the views of the mountains and the valley far below are fantastic. This is not a good road for impaired driving; errors will be fatal.
We drove most of the way down from the Whitney Portal trailhead and turned north through an area called the Alabama Hills. This is an area with fantastic rock formations that must look real Western-Movieish because scores of western movies were filmed in these rocks. Strangely, the movie Gunga Din was also filmed here but I thought that flick was supposed to take place in India. The road is washboard gravel through the Hills but we were going to go slowly anyway because the scenery is terrific here.
We eventually found our way out of the Alabama Hills, despite the complete lack of dirt road signs anywhere west of 395. We turned north and went to Manzanar National Historic Site a few miles away. They have a good visitor center there where almost all Americans can learn about being xenophobic zealots and putting all the people of a certain race into concentration camps. In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order empowering the Army to round up all those of Japanese ancestry, including U.S.citizens, and to imprison them without trial or compensation for lost assets due to internment. Nobody put in the camps had done anything wrong other than to have Japanese ancestors. Although WWII was fought against the Russians, Germans and Italians in addition to the Japanese, only those with Japanese ancestry were imprisoned. No person in Manzanar was ever charged or convicted of treason. Plenty of German-Americans were spies but free to operate with abandon.
Manzanar housed 10,000 people on one square mile in crummy buildings without heat or water. It is very hot here in the summer and below freezing in the winter. Very windy and dusty conditions prevail. Despite the miserable conditions, folks from the camp made the place better by installing Oriental gardens, a Kendo dogo, hospitals, schools, assembly buildings and shops throughout the camp. They worked on the production of U.S. war material while imprisoned in this shithole.
I think of those in the U.S. who believe that putting whole segments of the population in concentration camps while “extreme vetting” or Homeland Security trial backlogs delay them on their way to deportation. Eleven million Mexican citizens? All the Muslims? Syrians?
We should know better and if we don’t, those that advocate imprisonment of U.S. residents without trial should visit Manzanar.
We took some photos in the Whitney area, the Alabama Hills and at Manzanar. You can see some of ’em if you click here