Manzanar National Historic Site: A Glimpse into a Dark Part of America’s History

My mom and I traveled to this windy desert landscape to try to imagine what life was like behind the barbed wire fences of a war relocation center more than 70 years ago

I visit national parks to experience America, warts and all.

Luckily for me, my mom is a good sport about these things.  Traveling with her to national parks has become a regular part of my life. We spent her 80^th birthday touring the geyser basins of Yellowstone a few years ago. We’ve been to Glacier and Glacier Bay and Joshua Tree. We’ve even explored national parks overseas, like The Galapagos.   However, we’d never gone to one of the smaller, more obscure parks together—until last fall. 

Mom needed to get herself and her red Chevy Impala from Eugene, Oregon, to her winter habitat in Palm Springs, California. As her driver, I made sure we’d stop at Yosemite on the way south—and I picked a route along the eastern edge of the Sierra Mountains to include an important lesson from World War II, Manzanar National Historic Site.

Manzanar is one of several National Park Service units helping us to remember the injustice of interring Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. The country had been at war for more than a year when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942, giving U.S. armed forces broad powers to incarcerate anyone in the name of military defense. The government overwhelmingly used this power to imprison Japanese and Japanese-Americans for having “foreign enemy ancestry.” Ultimately, the military kept 120,000 innocent people under armed guard in isolated areas of the West, forcing them to leave their homes, businesses, possessions, and normal lives behind for the duration of the war.

Interring U.S. citizens because of their ethnic background and not for any real threat to national security must never, ever happen again. And who best to help us remember that story than the National Park Service, in collaboration with some of the very people who spent time at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

So after a walk with Mom along the edge of Mono Lake and a brief visit to Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite, it was back onto highway 395 for a glimpse into a dark part of America’s history.  

Of the 10 internment camps scattered across the country, only Manzanar remains much as it was 75 years ago. Its location in the high desert of the East Sierra under the shadow of Mt. Whitney ensured that it would remain today much like it was in 1945. Not many people want to live here, and for good reason. It is insanely hot in the summer and icy cold in the winter. And the wind never stops blowing. 

We bent into that wind as we waited on the steps for the visitor center to open and tell us its story. The visitor center is in the camp’s original auditorium building, and the walls speak—literally. When the site was established in 1992, many of the people who lived out the war at Manzanar were still alive, and their first-person accounts are the backbone of how NPS interprets the internment history. The site offers multimedia displays so you can actually hear the voices of the people interred at Manzanar as they tell their own stories.

In addition to the visitor center, NPS has reconstructed several housing barracks so you can imagine what it was like to have your life reduced to a suitcase and end up in a place like this. A 3.2-mile auto tour gave us a sense of just how big this place is. We saw roads, some foundations of buildings, and ornamental gardens built by residents who tried make this desolate place a bit more like home. 

Over 10,000 people lived in the 500 acres that were developed. They stayed for years. We stayed for hours and tried to imagine what it was like. My mother was particularly moved. She remembers Japanese-Americans in her hometown being taken away. It just didn’t make any sense to a ten-year-old girl from southern Oregon. It still doesn’t.

I visit national parks to experience all that is America, warts and all.  What makes the National Park System so engaging to me is its diversity. Both Yosemite and Manzanar tell important stories about our country, and to fully understand and appreciate America, we need both the good and bad chapters in the continuing evolution our history.

As my mom and I left Manzanar, a profound reflective silence filled the car. Interring Japanese and Japanese-Americans during WWII was one of America’s worst moments. I am constantly amazed at how the Park Service is sensitive, balanced, and accurate in how it shares these stories from our past. And these stories must be told, so this history is never repeated.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument: Winter Rains Bring Blossoms

Once dubbed the most dangerous park in the country, these wild Arizona lands are fully reopened, noticeably restored and full of botanic wonders.



Rain is a great transformer, and in the desert just a little bit of water can cause an explosion of color. Last year, I was fortunate to visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument at the end of the soft winter rains and was treated to blooming cacti, wildflowers and a desert teeming with birds. 

Established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 through the Antiquities Act, Organ Pipe is not on the way to anywhere. You have to want to go there, and for stamp #158 in my National Park Passport, I was more than happy to make the trip. My girlfriend Craig flew in from D.C., and we met at the Tucson airport where our friends Pat and Jennifer picked us up in a bright white Hyundai SUV and off we went. By the end of the trip, the Hyundai would be a much dustier and duller white! 

Although 95 percent of this desert park is designated wilderness, Organ Pipe’s 31-mile border with Mexico and its long history of smuggling and border-crossing fatalities have certainly impacted the wilderness experience.  In 2002, drug traffickers killed national park law enforcement ranger Kris Eggle, and in 2003, the National Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police named the park the most dangerous in the nation. This resulted in 70 percent of the park being closed for more than a decade until just two years ago, in September 2014, when it fully reopened to the public. Now, dramatically increased security has made the park safe for visitors, though park signs still warn that some people continue to make the dangerous trek to cross the border illegally through this rugged terrain.

Before we made it into the park, we decided to explore the mining town of Ajo, a 130-mile drive from Tucson and the closest town to Organ Pipe with decent lodging and cold beer. The copper mine at Ajo closed in 1985, so the town is evolving into what comes after mining goes away. Fortunately Ajo was well-designed by its founder, John Campbell Greenway, one of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the key executive who developed the mine. The town center has Spanish Colonial Revival-style buildings surrounding a green town plaza park which is currently being restored and revitalized for tourists and retirees. It is an easy town to walk in.

We stayed at The Guest House Inn, which was built for VIPs visiting the mine. The Guest House is quiet and comfortable, and the innkeeper, Mike, serves great breakfasts. After a good night’s rest and a visit to the local grocer for lunch, we headed to the park, which always includes a stop at the visitor center to get oriented (and get our NPS passport stamp!).  

Organ Pipe is in the Sonoran Desert and has two seasons of rain each year – a soft winter rain, which we experienced, and much heavier rainfall in July and August. The result of this regular rainfall is more plants than any other desert in the world. We wanted to explore different areas of the park to see different plant species, so we started with a couple of hikes off the 21-mile Ajo Mountain Loop.   

Our first stop was the Arch Canyon Trail for a hike into a narrow canyon with juniper and scrub oak trees. Turns out the Ajo Mountains get more rain than anywhere else in the park, and the lush, green vegetation along the streambed showed it. The short out-and-back hike served as a warm-up for our next walk, the 3.2-mile Estes Canyon Loop. This hike took us up a small wash that was filled with blooming saguaro, prickly pear and buckhorn cholla and onto a ridge of volcanic rock that gave us views south into Mexico and north into the mountains and ridges of the Ajo Range. The saguaro blooms are bright white and pollinated by uniquely evolved bats and white-winged doves. We saw plenty of these doves and a couple of gilded flickers nesting in a large saguaro. The cholla blooms run the gamut from predominately purple to red and yellow, and they covered the wash. We played hide-and-seek with an ash-throated flycatcher under a cloudy sky, and intermittent drizzles kept us cool as we walked and birded our way up the wash and over the granite and basalt ridges. It was truly a perfect day for a hike.

The other driving loop option at Organ Pipe is the 41-mile Puerto Blanco Drive. In late afternoon, we headed to the southern part of that loop, seeking the senita cactus, a common cactus in Mexico, but only found in the U.S. in the very southern part of Organ Pipe. The South Puerto Blanco Drive parallels the border before a short road turns right into Senita Basin, where we did find a senita cactus in the wild. Photos were taken! 

We were surprised that we saw no Border Patrol on our drive, as the South Puerto Blanco drive is literally a stone’s throw from the unfenced Mexican border, defined on the other side by a truck-filled highway.  As we drove to Senita Basin, it was clear why this area was closed until recently. We saw evidence of the more than 150 miles of illegal roads used to smuggle people and drugs across the border. There are still signs on every road and at every trailhead warning visitors that active smuggling still occurs. But we also saw the work underway by the Park Service to remove the road damage and restore the park. We felt perfectly safe.  

Back in Ajo, it was burgers and beer time at the only place in town for burgers and beer – 100 Estrella. We reviewed our bird lists and decided that a golden eagle and our nesting gilded flickers were the birds of the day. And we toasted how blessed we were to be able to hike and enjoy such a beautiful and green desert that was once largely closed off to the public.