Eastern Sierras Road Trip - Manzanar and Fish Hatchery

Friday, March 25, 2022

Today we visited the Manzanar National Historic Site and the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery.  The Manzanar visitor center didn’t open until 11:00 so we had a chance to relax a bit this morning before we had to leave.

Around 10:00 we decided to hit the road and drove north out of Lone Pine on 395 to the ManzanarNational Historic Site.  Manzanar is one of the World War II military style relocation centers where more than 120,000 Japanese were incarcerated for the duration of the war.  Japanese families were rounded up and they either lost their property and belongings or sold them at low prices taking huge losses.

Manzanar alone house more than 10,000 men, women and children.  It didn’t matter whether they were US citizens that had never been to Japan or immigrants who had lived in the US many years, they were all sent to these “relocation” camps, or as then President Roosevelt called them, "Concentration Camps".

Janis is of Japanese heritage and many of her Dad’s family (US citizens) were detained at Manzanar while he fought in the famed 442 Infantry Regiment (the most decorated regiment in US military history) in Europe.  Janis’s mother was sent to a detention camp in Gila, Arizona where she spent the war.  That gave us a very personal perspective on what this meant.

I thinks it’s worth describing what this camp was like so here is an excerpt from Wikipedia.

“The camp site was situated on 6,200 acres, leased from the City of Los Angeles with the developed portion covering approximately 540 acres.  Eight guard towers equipped with machine guns were located at intervals around the perimeter fence, which was topped by barbed wire.  The grid layout used in the camp was standard, and a similar layout was used in all of the relocation centers.

The residential area was about one square mile (2.6 km²), and consisted of 36 blocks of hastily constructed, 20-foot by 100-foot tarpaper barracks, with each family (up to eight people) living in a single 20-foot by 25-foot "apartment" in the barracks.

These apartments consisted of partitions with no ceilings, eliminating any chance of privacy.   Lack of privacy was a major problem, especially since the camp had communal men's and women's latrines.  Former Manzanar inmate Rosie Kakuuchi said that the communal facilities were ‘one of the hardest things to endure’, adding that neither the latrines nor showers had partitions or stalls.

Each residential block also had a communal mess hall (large enough to serve 300 people at one time), a laundry room, a recreation hall, an ironing room, and a heating oil storage tank, although Block 33 lacked a recreation hall.  In addition to the residential blocks, Manzanar had 34 additional blocks that had staff housing, camp administration offices, two warehouses, a garage, a camp hospital, and 24 firebreaks.”

We arrived before the visitor center opened, but there was an auto tour of the grounds and various exhibits open so we spent quite a bit of time doing that.  The buildings were all gone except for two barracks, a communal toilet building and mess hall.  The barracks contained displays of what life was like for 10,000 Japanese incarcerated here.  There were many first hand stories about just how bad this was.  The camp is situated in an area that is blistering hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter and the tar paper covered buildings did very little to keep out the cold winter winds or summer heat.

All the barracks are gone except for a few kept for exhibits.  They also kept one of the dining halls and communal bathrooms.

Each one of the signs going off into the distance marks where a barracks was.  This was one row in one block out of 36 blocks.

This is an example of the living space in each of the barracks.  There was no privacy at all.

The closest building is a communal bathroom and the furthest building is a mess hall.

The inside of the mess hall.

One of the eight guard towers that surrounded the compound.

After a couple of hours of touring the grounds, we returned to the visitor center that was now open.  It was very interesting and enlightening and the exhibits were wonderfully done.  We probably spent another hour in there seeing everything that was there.  There was a video of one thing I had forgotten about; it was in 1988 of then President Reagan signing an act from congress authorizing repayment to incarcerated Japanese and their descendants for all the losses that they had incurred and admitting that the US had made a terrible mistake in setting up the detainment camps.

I could go on and on about this, but I couldn’t do it justice.  I would encourage anyone who is in the area to stop by and visit as it is well worth it.

On a personal level, I was very moved by what I saw.  Quite a few years ago I visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC and seeing that was an overpoweringly emotional experience for me.  When I was young, it was people my age being sent to Vietnam for what seemed to us to be a senseless war.  Seeing those walls with all of the names of the young men that died just overpowered me with grief and sadness.  Manzanar is a totally different thing, but as I walked through the exhibits I was once again overcome with grief and sadness at how all of these people, through no fault of their own had their lives taken away from them.  They didn’t die, but they would never be able to return to life as they knew it.  Both of these places had a powerful effect on me.

After Manzanar, we continued north on 395 to the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery near the town of Independence.  It was built in 1917 and the original buildings were built in the Tudor Revival style.  It was the first fish hatchery in California, but the hatchery shut down in 2008 due to massive mudslides that devastated the ponds.  Due to its unique architecture and historical importance, it has been kept open as a park.

The facilities were still closed for the winter, but the grounds were open and there were picnic tables and we were hungry so we had our lunch there.  There was no one else there, but a half dozen ducks who visited us from time to time hoping for a handout.  The grounds were nice and there was a very large pond which was why the ducks were there.  We could see some good sized koi in the pond, but no trout, so the fish hatchery days were certainly over.

The main building of the Mt. Whitney Fish Hatchery.

These ducks were determined for us to share our lunches with them and they were persistent enough to get some handouts.  The real winners though, were a pair of crows that swooped in as we started to walk around the pond and flew off with a whole bag of chips.

Doug, Janis and I on our walk around the pond.

After lunch, it was time to head back to Lone Pine, but we decided to take a back way rather than the main highway.  It was an old dirt road that followed a now defunct small gauge railroad line.  The tracks are gone, but you can still see the rail bed along the road.  It was a mining area and you could see many dirt tracks heading up in the mountains to the old, mostly abandoned mines.  It would have been interesting to do a little exploring, but we had done enough for the day and headed for home.

When we got back to the house we saw these interesting cloud formations that led to a great sunset later.

After getting back to the house, we relaxed for a bit and then had a delicious lasagna that Doug and Janis had brought from home; we are certainly eating well on this trip.

After dinner we noticed there was a beautiful sunset outside so we spent some time taking pictures and enjoying the view.  After chatting for a while we called it a night and we would be going back into the Alabama Hills tomorrow and do a bit more exploring.