Way Down We Go

We headed down the 395 which follows a broad, flat valley flanked by two impressive ridges of high mountains. We stopped off at Manzanar, which was a Japanese concentration, sorry interment, camp for rounded up ethnic Japanese post Pearl Harbor. The fact that they were US citizens and it was completely against the Constitution was conveniently ignored, at least for a few years until they came to their senses. This was just 10,000 ethnic Japanese forced to abandon their homes & businesses and squashed into a square mile in the middle of a dusty desert for no reason. We stayed at a nice camp ground at a town just down the road which was towered over by the 14k ft Mt Whitney.

The next day we drove a couple of hours into Death Valley, we were surprised to still be at 4000 ft or so when we entered the park but we're soon going down down down! We reached our campsite at 200ft below sea level oh & did we say we wanted it to get hotter... Well this is a classic case of being careful what you wish for! It hit 40 C in the day & didn't cool down at night more than a few degrees. We still managed a hike up amongst the water carved sandstone canyons & visited the lowest point in N America at 282ft below sea level.Read more