The hook
Between the highway and the Sierra wall, the government held eleven thousand of its own citizens behind barbed wire for being of Japanese descent.
01Why it's worth it
Manzanar was one of ten camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, most of them US citizens, held on no charge and no evidence. Between March 1942 and November 1945 about 11,070 people were confined here on the dry floor of the Owens Valley, in tar-paper barracks against the wind and dust, the Sierra crest rising unreachable to the west. Most of the camp is gone, but the Park Service keeps it as the best-preserved of the ten sites: two barracks and a mess hall rebuilt in Block 14, the traced-out gardens people made to soften the place, and the white obelisk in the cemetery, the Soul Consoling Tower, raised by the prisoners in 1943. The interpretive center in the old auditorium is thorough and unflinching. It isn't a scenic stop. It's a place to see plainly what the country did.
02How to experience it
The site is off US-395 just south of Independence. Start in the interpretive center for the history, then drive the roughly three-mile auto tour past the building foundations, the reconstructed block, the gardens, and the cemetery monument at the far end. Entry is free and it's rarely crowded, so give it real time rather than a quick look. If you can come the last Saturday of April, the annual pilgrimage brings survivors and descendants back to the site.