The park is only accessible for zero carbon travel for a few weeks after the required shuttle service ends (mid September) and before the road closes (early to mid October). Shuttle buses are useful for reducing carbon pollution, but unless they’re sustainably fueled, they’re out of bounds to me. Red’s Meadow Cafe was still open, but the resort was closed when I arrived late September.
Since both the John Muir and Pacific Crest Trails run together through the park, I recommend you hike in a loop around the base of the broken basalt columns, across one of the two bridges across the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River, along the combined JMT & PCT trail ridge where I got the photo, and back across the other bridge. There are also pretty waterfalls at both the north and especially south ends of the monument, but be careful hiking as the park is at around 7,500 feet in altitude up near the Mammoth Mountain ski area. There’s also a trail up through the trees to the top of the columns, which were formed 80,000 years ago when a diabolically molten lake cooled and cracked deeply in hexagonal and similar shapes and which were revealed by glaciation 15,000 years ago. Enjoy!
Here’s the link to my visits to all parks in California.
Manzanar was the first of ten internment camps incarceration sites for Japanese-American citizens (and some non-citizens) to be recognized as a park unit in 1992, symbolizing the whole program fiasco. Minidoka was enacted in 2001, Tule Lake in 2008 and Amache in 2022.
Unconstitutional incarceration, while a federal program ordered by FDR, varied by state: Hawaii incarcerated few and west coast states many. Rules regarding how much Japanese ancestry got a US citizen locked up without trial also varied by state. No other group was incarcerated en masse. Popular sentiment (racism) generally backed incarcerating Japanese-American US citizens during the war.
George Takei spent his “boyhood behind the barbed wire fences” in Arkansas. He remembers that after his family was imprisoned, his neighbors “came to our house and took everything”. He recounts how after Pearl Harbor, many young Japanese Americans tried to enlist, were refused and were incarcerated. His experiences were common, and in many cases homes and all belongings were permanently lost during internment.
It was an egregious violation of the American Constitution. We were innocent American citizens, and we were imprisoned simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It shows us just how fragile our Constitution is.
George Takei
Many of the citizens imprisoned here were teachers, doctors, skilled craftsmen, farmers, community leaders and otherwise productive members of our society. (One was a Mexican-Irish-American who got locked up here in solidarity). They sued for their rights and in 1944, the Supreme Court declared that a loyal citizen could not be detained under the Constitution. The executive order was rescinded the next day.
In this blog, I try to encourage people to look at mistakes in history and imagine a better course of action, because if we can’t fix our mistakes, then we have no hope of solving the climate crisis. It’s morally wrong to visit this site and think, “well, I suppose there was no other way”. Some have argued that it was for the protection of Japanese Americans or to stop espionage. But there were better ways available at the time to accomplish those objectives.
FDR clearly failed in his oath as President when he did not uphold the Constitution and imprisoned these citizens without cause. He also suffered a failure of imagination. Instead of internment, FDR could have established voluntary Japanese-American citizens councils, led by Japanese Americans to meet regularly among themselves, with civil defense, local law enforcement, and with government representatives to propose ways of supporting their communities and the war effort. The councils could have addressed both safety and spying allegations.
Instead of being locked up, these citizens could have spent the war teaching, working in hospitals or factories, growing food and supporting our war effort. Instead of being an American example of “concentration camps” like those of our enemies, FDR missed his opportunity to stand up for the freedom of these Americans as a positive example of our Constitutional liberties for the world.
Follow this link to read about my visits to all the concentration camps, and here’s the link to all parks in California.
[N.B. César Chávez’s legacy has been profoundly damaged by evidence of sexual misconduct against vulnerable young women.]
I returned here today to see the exhibits, as they were closed when I visited last year. The black & white photos of the Delano grape strike and Chávez’s hunger strike remarks are particularly moving. Pesticides were not regulated at all then, and labor was denied rights by growers. Chávez’s national boycott of grapes helped change both.
Today, growers drain rivers, lakes, wetlands and water tables, even as the western half of the country suffers in drought. In Kern County, where the Monument is, the Kern River no longer flows to the Kern Lake, due to diversion for agriculture. In order to sell more produce, growers are ruining the environment for fish, animals and people. Climate change and some farming practices also exacerbate Valley Fever, a deadly fungal infection spreading in California & Arizona.
Agriculture is a trillion dollar industry in the US, with $150 billion in exports. But Big Ag prefers to blame Democrats, rather than face the fundamental challenge of the climate crisis. Big Ag needs to convert farm equipment to electric, and they need to stop using fossil fuel to ship their produce around the world. They also need to cooperate to restore wetlands to sequester carbon.
César Chávez devoted his life to raise awareness and lead civil disobedience to make change. He acknowledged that in the struggle against the rich and powerful, poor people only have their lives “and the justice of our cause” on their side. Today, we need more people to be just as devoted to stop the climate crisis.
Wisteria, photographed in my previous visit in 2021.
I enjoy revisiting parks now that I travel by electric vehicle (EV), but this one was particularly good. When Pinnacles was still a National Monument before 2013 and I still traveled by burning carbon, we took the kids, but our timing was a bit off. Pinnacles gets crowded on weekends with full campgrounds and limited parking at trailheads. And the seasons are tricky. Winter can be too cold with icy roads in the hills, and summer is too hot for me, especially with our new and changing climate. Spring break is popular, and the campground pool opens on April 1st this year. Last time, we experienced both too many crowds and too much heat. After a bit of research, I decided to go mid-week at the beginning of Spring.
The biggest difference is visiting the caves at Bear Gulch. To protect the large, sensitive colony of Townsend’s big eared bats, it’s rare to be able to visit the entire cave. I remember being underwhelmed by the caves on our earlier visit and described it as being more like a narrow canyon with a few boulders stuck overhead, compared to other caves in the park system. So this time, I checked the status of the caves, and I learned that the last week of March often has full cave access, before the bat breeding season starts. And wow, it was a very different experience.
First, I hiked from the campground to save EV battery range and get more exercise. That turned out to be a beautiful hike through varied terrain with quail, wild turkeys, woodpeckers, jays, turkey vultures and other birds. But when the Gulch narrowed, I felt the cold air from underground, even before entering the lower caves. Last time, we must have taken the less-scenic shortcut. This time, I felt like a spelunker. By the time I got to the upper caves, my iPhone was in my breast pocket for light, because scrambling and ducking required both hands. It was more adventure than I expected, but fortunately, people along the way helped keep me on the path to the lovely small reservoir at the top. Well worth revisiting!
“An elf would go underground, where a dwarf dare not. Oh, I’d never hear the end of it.” — LOTR Return of the King
I wrongly assumed that this preserve was just a flat sandy desert, but it is a varied terrain of mountains, mesas, canyons, and volcanic landscapes, in addition to sand dunes.
The Rings Loop Trail pictured, near the Hole-in-the-Wall visitor center, goes right through a canyon with Swiss-cheese holes in the walls. There are petroglyphs to see, fascinating views, and short ladders of iron rings to climb.
A couple of retired campers asked me about my long range Tesla 3. The recent spike in gas prices ($7 in California) interests people who regularly spend over $100 to fill their tanks. Of course it’s also a very fun car to drive with a low center of gravity and instant acceleration. But too many folks resist change, even when their carbon travel habits contribute to devastating change.
The common meme here is that the eponymous trees remind folks of Dr Seuss, but the stars here are the lumpy rocks. Every time I turned around, I half expected the rock monster from Galaxy Quest to stand up. I took this panorama less than 50 feet from my campsite. Exploring around here brings back that childhood sense of wonder, and the actual kids I saw also enjoyed scrambling all over the weird landscape.
Also, the tree that inspired Dr Seuss for the truffala trees in his Lorax story was a Monterey Cyprus, not a Joshua Tree. But it’s not a bad idea to think about the Lorax when visiting any park, since we need to protect our trees more than ever now. And since I’m correcting the record on trivial items, Jumbo Rocks Campground site #113 has plenty of parking for a 15′ 5″ long electric vehicle. The site description says that the parking space is limited to 13 foot long vehicles, and coincidentally I’ve noticed more than once that it is the last campsite available. So, if you have an EV, go ahead and book the site. If you’re driving a gas-guzzler, stay home.
“It’s a rock monster. It doesn’t have motivation.”
Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level. Highest peak, Telescope, is over 11,000 feet and is snow-capped.
Death Valley National Park is a repeat park for me. While famed for being hot and dry, the park contains both the Amargosa and Surprise Canyon wild & scenic rivers with beautiful oases. In February of 2024, there was enough water to kayak in Lake Manly. I last came here with my kids when I still traveled by burning carbon. This time I hiked out into the basin, since the grand scale is difficult to comprehend from the parking lot. While a very few species have adapted to the extreme climate, humans can not live here during the summer. And yet every day we choose continued desertification of our planet over choosing to convert from fossil fuels.
“All in the valley of Death, rode the six hundred”
First EV stop in a National Park Service unit was at the Paramount Ranch. I chose it, because I picked up my Tesla Model 3 in Burbank today.
Not much left to see of the old Western Town that was the TV backdrop for much of my childhood. The climate-change enhanced Woolsey Fire burned almost all of the park land in the Santa Monica Mountains in November 2018. Only the chapel and the railway platform remain. Westworld, Dr Quinn Medicine Woman, and Gunsmoke all filmed here among many others. Most of the buildings were just shells, but the facades made for dramatic sets. 1600 homes were burned, including a number owned by movie and TV stars nearby in Malibu.
Sad to imagine the devastation caused in part by people burning fossil fuels. Still, the trails are nice, including the Love Bug race track, and there were some kids horseback riding. I read somewhere that this is the only National Park unit that contains active television and movie sets.
