Volcanic Tablelands and Manzanar National Historic Site

Saturday and Sunday, October 4, and 5, 2014

After leaving Hot Creek we drove 30 miles south to Bishop. Saturday was chore day. Diesel, propane, banking, and groceries were on the list. Bishop has enough size to it to find what we needed, and then we rewarded ourselves with a late lunch at Amigoes on the main drag. Yummy Mexican food, and a parade outside, too. We couldn't figure out why so many people had chairs set up in the shade along the sidewalk. Bored and hot? Just as we finished, the cars from a huge historic car show at the fairgrounds paraded by. There must have been at least a hundred. It was fun to see the care that had been bestowed on their restoration. It made us feel old to look at some of the cars and comment on cars we had driven or ridden in during high school and college! Fun trip down memory lane.

Green Chile Burrito!

Classic Woodie

Vintage, Low-Rider Caddy - When Fins were In!

We needed a spot for the night, preferably free and quiet, so we drove north out of town to the Volcanic Tablelands, a BLM area where we could boondock. The dirt road climbed up onto the flat tablelands and it took a while to find a suitable spot. The few side roads were very sandy, and there were not many camping spots once you got away from the beginning of the main road where the big rigs could fit. We finally found a suitable spot, far enough off the road to be undisturbed by the occasional car, and flat enough to not need leveling blocks. The area was desolate, but beautiful, with views of the Sierra Nevada mountains on one side, and the White Mountains in Nevada on the other side. Once again the moon was high and bright illuminating the desert scrub and the volcanic rubble.

Volcanic Tablelands at sunset

USGS Seismograph and Remote Uplink near camp

Our camp with the White Mountains in the background

Sunday we hoped to finally reach the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine. It was only 60 miles south of Bishop. A short drive in the sunshine, but hot! Dropping 3,000 feet from Mono Lake to Bishop put us into the heat, and we learned that California was suffering from an unseasonal heat wave. I was tired of near freezing nights, but we were going to have to put up with hotter days to achieve warmer nights. The temperatures in the desert drop significantly once the sun goes down. In the meantime the daytime temperature was in the 90's.


Shortly before Lone Pine we reached Manzanar National Historic Site. We turned in to explore the site. Manzanar was the first Japanese-American Internment Camp established in WWII. The original high school auditorium has been restored and used as the exhibit center. All the over four hundred other buildings were disassembled at the end of the war, and carted off. Many of the older ranch homes and even motels in the Basin and Range are reassembled 20-foot by 100-foot barracks from Manzanar. The Park Service has reconstructed two barracks and a dining hall. Also the entire barracks area can be driven around and there are markers to describe numbered blocks. At the far end of the property is the cemetery with some graves and a memorial obelisk.

Manzanar guard tower and fence

Scale model showing hundreds of barracks

List of Internees

We stayed much longer than we expected. The exhibit is very well designed and we were woefully ignorant of this aspect of our history. Right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing anyone in the United States thought to be capable of collaborating with the enemy, to be put into detention camps. Out of fear and prejudice, anyone of Japanese descent, citizen or legal alien, was given a week's notice to dispose of their property, gather up bedding and personal items, but only as much as the families could physically carry, and report for deportment.

Memorial Obelisk at Cemetery

Our government was hastily constructing 10 camps, but in the meantime, these Americans were forced into temporary detention areas with no idea where they were being sent. Once they arrived at Manzanar in the desert of the Owens Valley, they were met by barbed wire fences, guard houses with search lights, and barracks little more than raw wood and tar paper. Each barrack was divided into four rooms with eight beds and filled with eight people whether they knew each other or not. There were no dividers, no furniture, hay stuffed mattresses, one small heater, one lone lightbulb, and no window coverings. There were small men's and women's latrines to serve 14 bunkhouses of 32 persons each. The latrines had no dividers for the toilets or showers. One big mess hall served each block and the food was typically canned American style food. There were 35 blocks and over 10,000 people at Manzanar.

Block dining hall

Dining Hall interior

Tarpaper covered barracks

Bunkroom

We explored the museum and walked the dusty grounds to see the barracks and mess hall. There are still the remains of rock walls for gardens where the internees tried to create beauty and peace out of a dreadful situation. There are many stories of how the internees coped with life in Manzanar after losing homes, businesses, and their livelihoods. No Japanese-American was ever charged with espionage and many lost their lives in WWII fighting for their country. Manzanar became a historic site in 1992, and the interpretive center opened in 2004, to remember those who lived there, and remind us as a nation never to resort to taking away the rights of our own citizens based on fear mongering and prejudice.


We left Manzanar sobered by our new dose of history and drove through the town of Lone Pine and up the Mt. Whitney Portal Road to the Alabama Hills. It took some time driving up dead end dirt roads until we found a good boondocking spot and we settled in for the night and a few days of exploring these wild rocks!

Set up at Meatloaf Camp