Manzanar National Historic Site

Wednesday dawned cool and windy. Bob and I decided to visit Manzanar National Historic Site. The site was created 1992 in remembrance of the 10,000 American citizens of Japanese heritage residing on the west coast who were herded into camps after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

As is our custom, we geocached our way to the site which is north of Lone Pine on US 395. There is not much remaining of the original buildings, most were moved or sold when the camp closed November 21, 1945.  Administrators even buried the gardens people built to make life bearable. Today, the original entrance remains. What was left of the auditorium has been made into the visitor center. One of the barracks has been rebuilt to house displays of life in the camp.

 Manzanar had 36 blocks arranged on the property. Each block had 14 barracks, 2 latrines, laundry room, ironing room, a mess hall and a recreation building. The building below was built as a representation of a mess hall.

 At the back of the property there is a cemetery. There are differing accounts of the number of people who were buried at Manzanar. It is known that most of those interred in this cemetery have been moved by their families to cemeteries in their hometowns. Only 6 remain--they had no known family members. The inscription on the obelisk translates as 'soul consoling tower.'

 On the wooden posts surrounding the obelisk people who visit Manzanar have hung colorful origami cranes.

It was a thought provoking visit to the site where an important part of our history occurred that does not need to repeat itself.

After finding the virtual caches at the site, we drove out past the cemetery to the reservoir that once served the camp. We needed to complete our caches. The reservoir is no longer used, but remains as a reminder of times past. Many of the workers who built the reservoir scratched their names and messages in the concrete.

When we returned to Sol, we found that we had missed a geocache further out than the reservoir. It wasn't a Manzanar cache, but a cache located near a spot where Ansel Adams took one of his famous photographs. Maybe we will get that cache on our next visit.