A day couple days of ups and downs…
Greetings from the Acres Landing trailer park in Desert Hot Springs. Yes, I am staying in a trailer park, but a pretty cool trailer park/hotel. All the trailers/rooms are classic Air Stream trailers. The one I am staying in is a 1947 Airstream Argosy. The exterior is in surprising excellent shape with one small dent — the aluminum exteriors of Airstream trailers are quite thin and prone to denting. I have experience with that when I owned and lived in an Airstream trailer while going to college in Washington State.
All the trailers in the park look great. The grounds are very carefully laid out and cared for, with gravel they groom like a Japanese Zen garden with scattered cactus and other succulents standing in for the stones in a Zen garden. There is a pool and hot tub, and each trailer has an outdoor stone tub for mineral baths — I will be taking some swims and maybe a mineral bath later this evening.
The interior of my trailer has been upgraded substantially with a very usable kitchen and even a tiled bathroom — the trailer would be too heavy to tow with all the upgrades. The bed was very comfortable and I slept well. I needed the sleep.
I started to write this sitting outside on the patio by the pool, but as the sun rose higher, the temperature rose and the biting flies came out, so I am back inside my trailer/room. The forecast for today here in Desert Hot Springs is for a high of 95 degrees — cool compared to the 110 degrees where I was a couple of days ago!
Sunday, two days ago was a day of highs and lows, ups and downs. I started the day by driving south heading to Manzanar, the War Internment Camp for US citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War. It is a sobering place to visit. Manzanar is a National Historic Site managed by the US National Park Service. It is very well maintained, and there is a very well done and informative tour, well two tours actually. A walking tour and if you want to invest the time, a driving tour. The camp was large, there were over 10,000 US citizens interred there at its peak, so you can imagine how large it was. For me, the cemetery at the western most part of the camp towards the mountains was the most impactful. There is a monument in the cemetery that I photographed along with a large number of origami crane strings, which Therese and I saw placed at the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb site in Japan. Here is what I found out about the monument and the origami cranes:
The large white obelisk is called Ireitō (慰霊塔), usually translated as "Soul Consoling Tower" or "Monument to Console the Spirits." The three kanji characters on the front mean:
慰 (i): to comfort or console
霊 (rei): spirits or souls of the dead
塔 (tō): tower or monument
It was built in 1943, by internees led by Ryozo Kado, a stonemason to honor those who died in the camp. There is an annual Manzanar Pilgrimage each spring, with Buddhist and Christian services held at its base. The origami cranes, along with coins, and flowers are left there as part of that service/remembrance.
The cranes are senbazuru (千羽鶴), meaning "thousand cranes." Traditionally it's a bundle of 1,000 origami cranes (orizuru, 折り鶴) folded and strung together, often as 40 strands of 25 cranes.
The visit was sobering and and a somber beginning to the day. From there I drove up from Lone Pine to Horseshoe Meadows where the trail to the Golden Trout Wilderness starts. My friend Mike and I once visited that wilderness area for a couple of days and yes, the trout are golden - beautiful. I realized when thinking about that trip that the only person I have known longer than Mike is my sister! A lasting and much appreciated friendship — thanks Mike.
The drive up from Lone Pine, at approximately 4000 feet of elevation, to Horseshoe Meadows where the altitude is just over 10,000 feet is crazy and beautiful. The meadows are not quite the highest point in California, but thought to be the highest point accessible by a paved road. That was the high of the day, and from there I headed to the lowest point in North America — Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park at 282 feet below sea level.
The road to Death Valley was one I know well, and those memories are painful, and I mean real pain. I rode from Death Valley to Mt Whitney Portal in the bicycle races I mentioned in my previous post. I am amazed I was able to complete the climbs up and over two ranges of mountains to get out of Death Valley to Lone Pine — a different time in my life.
The actual altitude of Badwater Basin can change based on rainfall and evaporation over time. The salt flats of the basin are supposed to be a mosaic of salt water polygons made as the rainwater evaporates. Unfortunately, too many visitors had walked out to see them, disturbing them for several hundred yards from the parking lot. The temperature was 110 degrees, so I decided not to walk out any further — a disappointment, that would be repeated several times during my short visit to Death Valley.
The parking lot at Zabriskie Point was full, the Harmony Borax Mining site was interesting but not very scenic. The Artist Road, a short dirt road that had a sign at the entrance warning that vehicles longer that 21 feet were banned. There were acutely sharp turns with walls twice the height of my SUV rental! The road led to a mountain side called the Artist Palette. The mineral deposits created a splash of colors — greens and dirty magentas primarily. I took some images, but the colors just do not stand out like seeing them in person. The road was busy, not rush hour busy but close.
All of these sites were miles apart and with gas running in the $6.50 to $7.39 range, the drive an expensive series of disappointments. I stayed at the Stovepipe Wells Village Hotel, the most expensive lodging of the trip so far, by far. It is easy to understand why it is so expensive when you take into consideration that everything, the expensive gasoline, the food, the water, the trash, the waste water, etc. all have have to be transported in or out of the park, up and over those mountain ranges. Overall, the visit to Death Valley was the low point of the trip so far, literally and emotionally, I just wanted to get out and on the road. And, that is where I will pick up in my next post.
Here is a link to a few images from a car show in Bishop on Saturday, the drive to Manzanar and my visit to Manzanar, the drive up to Horseshoe Meadows, and the Artist’s Palette in Death Valley. Most of these are straight out of my iPhone, I will need to edit them later — CLICK HERE.