Eastern Sierras Road Trip - More Alabama Hills

Saturday, March 26, 2022

Today didn’t get off to a very good start.  I came downstairs to get my breakfast and Doug said he had some bad news – my rear driver’s side tire was flat.  How could that be, my car is a week old today and I already have a flat tire?  Unfortunately it was true and very flat.

I skipped breakfast and immediately went out to change it which was pretty easy, but took a bit longer as things were a little different than my old 4Runner.  The next problem was finding a place to fix it and someone across the road from our house came over when he saw me changing my tire and said there was only one place in Lone Pine that would fix tires and that was Miller’s Automotive.  They weren’t open yet so I ate some breakfast and then gave them a call and they said bring it in.

Hard at work changing the tire.  Since it was a new vehicle for me, I was looking for a place to set the jack.

Val and I drove into Lone Pine and found the repair place.  Miller’s Automotive is the kind of place you would expect to find in a small town, but evidently they get a lot of tire problems as they had a section just for that and as we pulled in a guy walked out like he was expecting us (I guess he was) and told us where to pull in.  He was very nice and talked to us as he repaired the tire; I picked up a lot of good advice I didn’t know about tires.  He said the puncture was caused by a small sharp rock that had gotten caught in the grooves between the tread.  I have driven quite a bit off road and this is the first time I have ever had a flat tire caused by a rock.  He quickly fixed it and even reinstalled it on the car for me and we were on our way back to the house.  Thanks to Miller’s Automotive, our day was saved.

Then, when we got back to the house, I had to put the spare back up in its place and by the time I got back in the house, Doug, Janis and Val were already packing our lunch for the day’s outing.

Our plan for the day was to do some more exploring in the Alabama Hills, but since it was getting a little late in the morning, we decided to drive all the way to the end of Whitney Portal road and have a picnic in the campground there.  Whitney Portal is the starting point to hike up to the top of Mt. Whitney; a pretty arduous hike.  Doug has done the hike several times and once with our dad when he was in his early seventies (my dad not Doug 😄).

As we got a mile or two from the end we were surprised to see a “Road Closed for the Winter” sign, we had forgotten that it’s still winter in the higher elevations.  Since our plans for lunch were thwarted, we drove back down to continue our exploration of the Alabama Hills.  We had gotten a map from the Movie Museum that listed some of the well-known movie sites so we decided to find some of those, but there was nothing left of them to see except the locations where they had been.  It was still interesting to drive around as the area is very beautiful and interesting.

This was where Gunga Din's camp was in the movie Gunga Din, but there was nothing left of the set so you had to use your imagination..

We also visited several arches including Cave Arch and the Eye of Alabama Arch

The area around Cave Arch

This was the aptly names "Cave Arch"

Doug and I hiked up to the Eye of Alabama Arch and even though it was only a quarter of a mile hike, the last 100 yards or so was very steep and loose gravel.  The disappointing thing was that even though we had some great views of the arch going up, after walking the last 100 yards we were behind the arch, which was hidden and there was no way (at least for a non-rock climber) to climb up to the arch.  We still had a great time doing it and the trek down went very quickly.

The Eye of Alabama Arch

That's the 4Runner way down below by the road.

Val took these from below.  That's Doug and I on our way up.

Doug and I are up above the arch, but couldn't see it and couldn't find a way to get up to it.

We were getting hungry so the next order of business was to find a place to have our lunch.  We found a nice spot that sheltered us from the wind that had started to blow and we had a nice lunch.  The temperatures during the days have been in the mid-seventies up into the low eighties so it has been very pleasant.

Doug and Janis getting ready for lunch.

We really enjoyed our lunch break, but it doesn't look like anyone is enjoying me interrupting their lunch taking pictures.

We checked out a few more movie sites and at one point found our way on a very tight road with very little clearance between the rocks on both sides.  There was no way I was going to let my new car get scratched or damaged to I got out and guided Val driving through the narrow section.  I had read about that section when I was researching the trip, but I didn’t really know where it was, but we found it and made our way through with no harm done.

We decided to call it a day and head back to the house.  We spent the afternoon relaxing, although I had to catch up on the blog so I spent quite a bit of time doing that.

 

These last two pictures were taken on Tuttle Creek Road that leads to our rental house.  Not a bad drive to get home.

Dinner tonight was like a greatest hits meal as we finished up the leftovers from our previous three nights – everything was still very good and we had a great dinner.

The rest of the evening was spent relaxing and chatting.  We decided tomorrow we would drive up to the Bishop area and do an off road trip.

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.

Eastern Sierras Road Trip - In Search of Arches

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Val and I are not early risers, but Doug and Janis are so by the time we were up at 7:30, Doug had run a few miles and then gone for a walk with Janis.  After everyone had showered and eaten breakfast, we were ready to hit the road and start our day.

The first thing we wanted to do was to visit the Eastern Sierra Interagency Visitor's Center in Lone Pine and while we found the displays interesting, the ranger was less than interested in helping us.  It didn’t really matter as we are pretty familiar with the area, but it’s unusual to find a ranger that isn’t eager to share his knowledge.

Doug, Janis and Val in front of the Visitor's Center

They were taking in this great view of the Sierras.

Our next stop was the Museum of Western Film History that is located in Lone Pine.  The Alabama Hills area is a favorite place for movies to be filmed, particularly westerns.  Back in the 1930’s and 40’s they averaged a new movie being started every week.  Most of the movies were “B” cowboy movies but there were also plenty of feature length movies being shot too.  The museum was great; I was expecting just a small museum, but this was quite large and had an extensive collection of memorabilia as well as a full history the movies, actors and other information.  We really enjoyed our visit and I would recommend it to anyone visiting the area.

For my birthday, Val had given me a book on the Arches of the Alabama Hills by Orlyn Fordham.  The author had located over 70 arches and other landmarks and provided GPS coordinates that I entered into a map program (GAIA Maps) and tracking some of them down was our goal today.  We weren’t going to try to see all of them, but we were going to try to see the author’s favorites and that was our next activity after returning to the house and having lunch.

After lunch we headed off into the Alabama Hills, which didn’t take long as our rental house is right in them.  One thing to bear in mind, the arches of the Alabama Hills are not like the arches you might see in Arches National Park, they are much smaller, but very interesting none the less.

Our first stop was the Whitney Portal Arch.  With the GPS coordinates marked on my map it was easy to find the trail.  He said the walk was an easy short hike, but he is probably much younger than we are and although it wasn’t too bad, there was a climb in and out of a deep gully with lots of deep sand making it more difficult.  When I was in my 20’s or 30’s this would have been quite easy, but at 74 I have to admit that my age is catching up with me a bit.

Nonetheless, we all made it, but were surprised to find that the arch wasn’t on a trail, but off in the distance at the top of a steep hill.  Val and Janis said they weren’t going any further, but would wait for Doug and I.  We started off cross country to get to the bottom of the hill and after hiking for a bit, we realized that the bottom of the hill still seemed quite a ways off so we decided it wasn’t worth it and headed back.

The start of the trail

The Whitney Portal Arch is very difficult to see in this photo without zooming in.  We had trouble finding it until Janis spotted it.

Here is a zoomed in view of the Whitney Portal Arch.

Doug and I decided to take the trek over and up to the arch, but as we hiked across the open terrain we realized it was much further and more difficult than we thought and gave up.

Val and Janis waited in the shade while Doug and I made our ill-fated attempt to hike to the arch.

We start our hike back to the car.

Doug and I on the trail.

The next arch we decided to visit was the Mobius Arch. It's very popular and well known among photographers as you can shoot a picture of Mt. Whitney framed by the arch.  That walk also proved to be a bit arduous (for us older folks) and Val decided to turn back.  After a hip and two knee replacements walking in rough terrain is a lot more difficult for her than it used to be.  Many years ago my dad and mom had brought us here to show us the arch so she had already seen it anyway.

The Heart Arch at the beginning of the trail.

The trail to Mobius Arch.

Doug, Janis and I pressed on and finally found the arch.  It wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it, but that was because of my memory not because the terrain had changed.  After spending some time at the arch and the nearby smaller Lathe Arch, we headed back.  We found the trail was actually a loop and the way back was much easier than the way in so if we had known that, Val could have easily made the hike.  Oh well, she enjoyed her time anyway.

The Mobius Arch with Mt. Whitney framed in the background.

There were a couple of old movie sites in the area so we drove by those, but you had to use your imagination as there was nothing left to see.  It was getting later and our hikes had taken lot more time than expected so we decided to forgo the last arch we were going to visit as that was another arch that required an overland trek.

The whole Alabama Hills area is interesting though, so we spent some time exploring some of the side roads and then driving the whole length of Movie Road that would take us back to US 395 north of Lone Pine.

We stopped to watch these mules on our drive back.

My brand new 4Runner covered in dust after only one day.

We were all a bit tired by the time we got back to the house so we relaxed a bit.  Tonight, Doug and Janis were taking care of dinner and Doug grilled some chicken and zucchini and along with bread and a salad we had a very tasty and wonderful dinner with more of Val’s chocolate cake for dessert.

We relaxed after dinner and made our plans for tomorrow and I decided to try my hand at astrophotography.  Another book Val bought me for my birthday was how to take pictures of the stars.  I had tried it a bit at home, but with the lights of Atascadero, the stars weren’t very bright.  I figured that here in Lone Pine the stars would appear much brighter and they did when you looked at them, but my photo results weren’t very exciting.  I don’t know what I did wrong, but the results were disappointing.  Oh well, I have a few more nights this trip to hone my skills.

Although this picture shows a lot of stars, the lack of something in the foreground makes it pretty uninteresting.

Eastern Sierras Road Trip - The Drive to Lone Pine

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

It is only a five hour drive from our home to Lone Pine, but we didn’t want to get there too late so we were on the road by 9:30.  It was an easy drive with our only stop being for lunch in Tehachapi.  I had read online that gas was well over six dollars a gallon in the area around Lone Pine so after lunch we drove through Tehachapi and found gas for only $5.45 a gallon, a real bargain for what we’re used to in Atascadero.

We arrived at our rental house in Lone Pine at 3:30 and found Doug and Janis there waiting for us.  We unloaded the cars and settled in and relaxed a bit after our drive until dinner time.

The house is very nice, nothing fancy but very comfortable and the location in the Alabama Hills is great.  It is a two story house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms plus a well equipped kitchen and dining area.  Adjoining the kitchen is a large recreation room with a ping pong table and other games.  If it were my house, I would have used the recreation area as a den or at least added some seating as the views of the Alabama Hills from that room are very nice.  There is a nice living room with a wood burning stove that is a comfortable place to hang out.

The best part of the house is the outside with views of the Sierras in the distance on one side and the Inyo Mountains from the other side and the rock formations of the Alabama Hills all around.  There is a large patio at the back of the house with a grill, plenty of seating and a fire pit.  In the front of the house there is another outdoor seating area with views of the Sierras, another fire pit and misters to keep things cool in the summer.  There is a deck off of all three bedrooms upstairs so there is plenty of opportunity to enjoy the views and the outside while staying at the house.

The front of the house.  Two of the bedrooms upstairs share the deck above the garage.

There is a patio at the front of the house with misters for the heat of the summer.

The rear patio.  The deck above is off the master bedroom.

We had views of the Sierras to the west ...

and views of the Inyo Mountains to the East with the Alabama Hills all around us.

Val had prepared a taco casserole before we left for our dinner tonight and it was delicious.  She also brought a chocolate marshmallow cake that was even more delicious, an excellent dinner all around.

After dinner we relaxed, chatted a bit and discussed our plans for tomorrow.  We decided that we would spend our first day exploring the Alabama Hills. 

Eastern Sierras Road Trip

You may have guessed by the lack of any blog posts that we did cancel our Panama Canal Cruise.  We hated to do it, but the Omicron variant of Covid was raging and we felt the wisest thing to do was not take any chances and cancel, we'll do it some other time.  We did take a short trip to Lake Tahoe for my birthday, but that was all the traveling we have done since our Escalante Trip.  That is about to change.

A few weeks ago Val asked me what I thought about doing a road trip to the Eastern Sierras.  I told her it sounded like a great idea to me so she turned on her computer and started looking for a rental house and found a nice one in Lone Pine, a small town near the southern end of the Sierras.  We asked my brother Doug and his wife Janis if they were interested in joining and they were, the trip was getting better and better.

I am writing this on Monday, the day before we leave, and two days ago the trip got even better (for me at least).  My trusty Toyota 4Runner is 13 years old and about a year ago I decided to replace it, but they were in very short supply and sold quickly and I just couldn't find what I wanted.  Suddenly last Friday night everything came together and I found the car I wanted and by Saturday evening I had a brand new 2022 4Runner - just in time to break it in on a road trip.

So what could be better, we get out on the road again, we get to spend a week with Doug and Janis in the beautiful Eastern Sierras, and we get to do it in a brand new car.