We visit the Manzanar National Historic Site every time we're in the Owens Valley, which is once or twice a year for the past eight years or more. They've been slowing adding information and restorations, including a really wonderful interpretive center.If you're traveling through you really must stop and explore.
This is the entrance to the graveyard. People have hung origami figures all around it.
The central monument in the graveyard.
People put mementos on the monument. This apple came from one of the trees in the orchard here. Manzanar means orchard in Spanish. There was a very small town here by that name around the turn of the 19th Century.
One of the baby graves.
The ranger at the interpretive center told us that they'd made progress in excavating Peace Park, one of several gardens built by the Japanese-American internees during their time at Manzanar. We'd seen the standing stones before, but the painted writing had worn away.
This is amazing! This was taken from the newly excavated basin of one of the intricately constructed ponds. Dirt used to come almost all the way up to the rocks and covered many of them. The site's much bigger than we realized from what used to protrude.The ranger told us they'd removed as much as four feet of sand!
Elk tracks near Peace Park. They have the run of the place and it seemd like they might actually have been frolicking here earlier in the day!
