Our USA Adventure - Days 25 to 29 - Joshua Tree, Lone Pine, Alabama Hills, Manzanar & Willow Springs

A very happy Brian having led the climb Upper Right Ski Track at Joshua Tree

Friday was a great day, we woke early so got up and went to Joshua Tree park. Intersection Rock and a climb called Upper Right Ski Track. Great climb, Brian led it, found it easy (but so it should have been) but great exposure, good gear placements, and if that’s all the climbing we do, it was worth bringing the gear. We followed this with a short, sharp hike up Ryan Mountain, 3ish miles and a height of 5458’ or 1664m (See our Relive video with more photos of our hike: click here). Joe had said 07.00 or 16.45 , so 10.55 wasn’t either of those, but we were fine. Stopped off for a small bite of lunch at the hotel, then continued to Pioneer Town, a living film set. Interesting to wander around, but disappointing they weren’t filming anything.

On top of Ryan Mountain, 5458 feet. A classic climb followed by a mountain peak and it was still before lunch!

Thai meal for dinner, reviews were half good, half bad. They were both right, the waitress was shocking, but the food was great. Brian wanted a jungle curry, usually the hottest thing on a Thai menu, and you could pick your heat, between 0 and 10, but she wouldn’t let him go above a 2. I had my Panang curry at a 1 and we waited to see. They were both delicious but certainly wouldn’t have wanted them any hotter! What is the point in 0-10 if 2 s the limit probably for 90% of people?

Great views from the top of Ryan Mountain too

Death Valley had been our next plan, but Joe has persuaded us to do it at the end of the trip, so up the US395 which has been recommended by all sorts of people including complete strangers. We’d had a weather warning for wind and we could see the clouds as we headed NW. On going north we missed the worst of it, but not all. We arrived in Lone Pine where it was still very windy. We occasionally got views of the summit of Mt Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous US at 14505 feet. Very popular, relatively easy, just high. You have to enter a lottery for a permit to climb, 100 day hikers and 60 doing it with an overnight, don’t think many summitted today! We had time to visit the visitor centre and the movie museum, before completely getting blown away.

Pioneertown, built as a western filmset but also with accommodation for staff during filming, it is now a permanent settlement with shops and bars and people living there permanently

I’d arrived in shorts and sandals, with a cardigan as a nod to the wind, but overnight the cold weather warning came into force, so Sunday was jumpers and down jackets as we explored the Alabama Hills. This small park was used in countless western movies and series, in Tremors in the ‘80s and more recently in IronMan and Django Unchained. In the past it has also been India in Gunga Din and Greece in Gladiator. Great to drive round, but now we’ve got lots of movies to watch to see if we can recognise the landscape. We finished off by going up Whitney Portal Road, to the trailhead of the walk. It was beautiful, little lake, ice forming on the waterfall, no sign of the bears that apparently frequent the area, and a campsite and shop!

Lone Pine, the Alabama Hills and the truly spectacular Sierra Nevada mountains and Mount Whitney

Lone Pine hadn’t been on Brian’s original list, but it was a really good stop, we just had time to look at the memorial to those who died in an earthquake in 1872 and to see the oak tree, grown from an acorn from Sherwood Forest. We didn’t have time for Manzanar, just up the road, so we’ve done that this morning.

The Alabama Hills were the setting for many films, old westerns such as Bonanza and Rawhide and many others. This site, our leaflet told us was the setting for The Lone Ranger

Manzanar was a Japanese relocation camp where 10000 American citizens of Japanese origin were put in 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. One of ten such camps. It’s a sobering place, full of racism and mistrust, but still with some optimism, they had a hospital and schooling, laundry’s and mess stations. The latrines however had no internal walls so toileting and showering had no privacy. They built gardens and grew crops and made lives, they just couldn’t leave. When they were ‘let out’ in 1945 many of them found it hard to go back into everyday life, where they were abused and had struggles.

Here they filmed a bridge scene for Gunga Din

After a quick stop in Bishop for Schats German bakery, as recommended by Joe, we continued to our stop for the night, Via a very pretty scenic drive, the June Lake loop. Virginia Creek Settlement sounded weird on bookings.com, and it’s not really where we wanted to be, but choices were limited. Having arrived though, it’s fabulous, a little cabin, the river, and a cat, on my lap, as I type. Apart from a bear on the rocks the other side of the river I couldn’t want for anything else.

As well as all those film locations (of which there are many), Alabama Hills is also famous for it's rock arches. This one, beautifully framing Mount Whitney is called Mobius Arch

Heart Arch

Eye of Alabama Hills Arch

And by climbing up and round the back I could, again, frame Mount Whitney through it

This is Mount Whitney, 14505 feet. Usually climbed in a day, taking about 22 hours round trip, its a non-technical peak so you just need fitness, stamina and be fully acclimatised. I got quite excited about it talking to all the people getting ready to do it. Maybe one day!

But there is another story I wanted to tell you about this high altitude remote community on the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains and it concerns Los Angeles, situated 200 miles away on the other side of the mountain range. The Owens River runs through this valley and into the Owens Lake and has long supported communities here, but that changed in 1905 when the new city of Los Angeles, that has no natural water supply, decided to build a man-made waterway to take the water from the Owens River all the way to the new city. Over the course of the following 20 years Owens Lake dried up and the farming communities lost their harvests. Owens Lake was a salt water lake and, after it dried up the frequent strong winds here whipped up the dried salt and sand making life very unpleasant. This photo is the canal full of water on its way to LA. The locals rebelled and damaged the waterway in 1924 and, eventually LA were forced to make some concessions and allow the area to keep some of their water. The dried bed of Owens Lake is now crisscrossed with water jets that spray water onto the salt and sand keeping it moist to prevent the wind picking it up. A sad situation and all to provide water to the second largest city in the USA that is only there as this upland community had its water stolen from it

I took this photo up at the Mount Whitney trailhead. Isn't he the cutest!

It is mandatory when hiking Mount Whitney to take your poop out with you and this little box here at the start allows you to take a plastic bag to put it in and the instructions shows you how to store it and bring it out with you 

The oak tree behind apparently came from Sherwood Forest in England and is doing very nicely here in the desert (with a hosepipe permanently watering it!)

We went on to Manzanar just up the road from Lone Pine to the site of a dark past in American history. Just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor hysteria in the US towards anyone who even looked Japanese, even if they were US citizens and were born here, meant that more than 100,000 of them were rounded up and put into 10 internment camps around the country. This, at Manzanar was one of them. Over 10,000 people of Japanese origin living in the US, running businesses, fishermen, shopkeepers and the like were uprooted and taken here to live in huts like this one, surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers and Military Police. They lost everything except that which they could carry 

This is a model of the camp. Each one of those rectangles is a wooden hut like the one in the photo above. 10,000 people lived here for three years

This is a re-creation, but this is how they would have lived

Another re-creation, but this is their toilet block. No panels between them, they just sat side by side. Whilst here they had schools and children were taught about American values and democracy. Ironic as these American citizens were locked up, how do you reconcile American values and democracy in a situation like that?

People lived and died here and this is the cemetery, subject now to an annual pilgrimage here on Memorial Day

We'd carried on up the US395 now and this photo is in the town of Bishop, where we visited Eric Schatts bakery to buy some lunch. The shop is as good as we'd heard, but I took this photo as I was struck by the grass. We've been in the desert for quite a while now and this little well watered park has lovely green grass and it seemed so odd and out of place. We had to walk on it and feel it beneath our feet.  Funny how something so common in the UK is suddenly revered in a place like this

We're up in the high mountains now and this is on the June Lake Loop, near the top of the Tioga Pass that leads down onto the western side of the mountains into Yosemite. There's a ski area here in the winter, it's not open yet (and it's not that big either, probably not worth us coming back up to try to ski)

And here's our nice little cabin in the mountains for two nights. We've got a fire pit and chairs overlooking a mountain stream and a mountain to look at, plus, Jackie has found a friendly cat! Rather than air-con we have a heater as it's pretty cold at this altitude. Jumpers and warm coats are out until we head down back into the heat on the western side of the mountains on Wednesday