Manzanar National Historic Site

This is a blog I posted a few years ago for CSC Motorcycles.  It was a one-day road trip headed north on the Three Flags Highway. That’s US Highway 395 in the photo below, which runs from the border with Mexico all the way up to Canada. My destination was the Manzanar National Historic Site, and I went there to do a story for Motorcycle Classics magazine.

Highway 395 is magnificent, but I wanted to scoot up there quickly and do a bit of exploring in and around Manzanar, which is 210 miles north for me.

Any road trip through this region wouldn’t be complete without a peek at the Cottonwood charcoal kilns (and a peek from within the kilns).

The Cottonwood charcoal kilns are about 10 miles south of Manzanar and about a mile to the east of Highway 395. It’s soft sand getting there.  It was no problem on my KLR 650.

When World War II broke out, Franklin Roosevelt had Americans of Japanese descent from the three western states on the Pacific interred in what were basically concentration camps. It was a national disgrace, it’s hard to believe such things occurred in this country, and if I had to choose a single word to describe my visit, it would be “disturbing.”

The camp was just to the right of the guard tower you see above. Even though it was 104 degrees down on the Mojave floor when I shot this photo, you can still see snow in the eastern Sierras.

There were 10,000 Japanese-American prisoners kept at Manzanar. This is the inside of one of their barracks.

One of the Japanese-American internees was a kid named Bob Uragami. When I worked for Aerojet (in another life a few decades ago), Bob worked with me in the cluster bomb business. He was a test engineer.

There was a list inside the museum at Manzanar, and I found Bob’s name…he was rounded up with the rest of his family when he was a boy.

Here’s a view looking out the door of one of the barracks toward the Sierras.

This is the Manzanar cemetery. It’s about a mile away from the barracks on a dirt road, but the road inside the prison grounds is hard pack.  It’s not a problem on a motorcycle.

And the exit…the camp was guarded by US Army MPs.

I had my Nikon with me, and I made a bunch of stops to take photos as I rode through the desert on the home. Check out this unusual house, guarded by a rusty T-rex.

You see a lot of unusual things out in the Mojave, not the least of which was a collection of iron art.

One final shot, folks…a selfie.

The ride to Manzanar and the National Historic Site was a good one.  You’ll want to check the weather before you leave.  Highway 395 has temperatures well over 100 degrees during the summer, and it can be a very, very cold ride during the winter.

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