Tag Archives: California

August days in Death Valley

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During the summer months at Death Valley, birds sometimes drop out of the sky, killed by the extreme heat. Would our car die as well? As the car slid down Highway 190 into Death Valley, the temperature indicator continued to climb: 105, 110, 112, 115, eventually topping out at 123 degrees F. Would the tires hold up? Can cars even drive in such heat?

We’d hardly seen another vehicle on this road on this hot August afternoon. But when we pulled into the parking lot at Father Crowley Vista Point, we felt better, as plenty of other visitors joined us there for views of Rainbow Canyon.

We had read that birds sometimes sometimes drop out of the sky, and then, on a short morning hike, we found this little bird, still warm.

Visiting Death Valley at the peak of summer is a unique experience. It’s probably  not for everyone,  but I went there in August, 2018, and had a lovely time exploring the park, the largest outside of Alaska.

Although we had a car full of camping gear, camping was not an option. As we drove by, one lonely tent sat in the campground at Emigrant, and not a single tree.  The temperature here was about 119 degrees, and probably  15 or 20 degrees higher in the  heat-absorbing tent.  But summer is “low season” at Death Valley, and we scored a last-minute air-conditioned room at the Furnace Creek Ranch, motel-style accommodations with a mediocre family-style restaurant and a fantastic pool. Across the road, the fancy Furnace Creek Inn beckoned with all of its 1920s glamour and low summer rates, but alas, the inn was full.

In the winter, I could spend a lot of time exploring the nooks and crannies of Death Valley, which features mountains and canyons galore, as well as the lowest point in the United States, Badwater Basin. There is also the weird Scotty’s Castle, one-time vacation home to Chicago businessman Albert Johnson and his wife Bessie, along with their sidekick, the con artist/cowboy Walter Scott. Unfortunately, the Castle is closed until 2020, as it sustained severe damage in a 2015 flash flood.

In the summer, signs posted everywhere remind visitors that hiking after 10 a.m. is dangerous and not recommended. Thus, we set our alarms for 4:45 a.m., intent on greeting the day at Badwater Basin. By dawn, the temperature had cooled to a reasonable 100 degrees or so — a dry heat.  By 5:30 a.m.,  we were wandering around the Basin in blissful solitude.

Soaking up 282 feet below sea level as the sun rises as Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the United States.

By the time we left the Basin around 7 a.m., three or four other people had gathered. I love national parks, but they are often very crowded. Lack of crowds is a huge benefit in visiting Death Valley  and other parks off-season.

After the sunrise, when the temperature had climbed to a reasonable 105 or so, we headed up a nearby gravel road to the trailhead for the short hike into Natural Bridge Canyon.

The hike up Natural Bridge Canyon is do-able in extreme heat, especially before 10 a.m.

The hike — about one-mile round trip, depending on how far you hike in — offers some fun rock scrambles and interesting geological features.

Scrambling up the rocks in Natural Bridge Canyon.

Then, after a drive along Artist’s Palette loop road, (which shows off its best colors closer to sunrise or sunset) we returned to the air-conditioned visitor’s center to check out the exhibits, and then to our room at the Ranch for siesta.

The pool at the Furnace Creek Ranch feels very decadent in this land of little rain, but I still enjoyed lounging around in it during the hottest part of the afternoon as well as later in the evening, when the temperatures cooled to a balmy 105 degrees or so.  An abundant natural spring supplies water to the pool through a gravity-fed system, and the water is then re-used to irrigate the landscaping, gardens and the resort’s golf-course. Learning all of this — and that the resort is a California Green Lodging Certified property — eased any remaining guilt I felt about cooling off.

That evening, after a visit to the glamorous Furnace Creek Inn for a late afternoon snack, we headed to Zabriskie Point to catch the sunrise and watch the colors of the sunrise play out across the folds of the Death Valley.

Zabriskie Point at sunset. Don’t be fooled by my solitary pose — sunset at Zabriskie always attracts a crowd, even on the hottest days of summer.

Death Valley attracts many European visitors in August, and we found ourselves surrounded by a mix of French, German, Italian, Spanish and other voices.

After sunset, the temperature cooled down.

Evidence suggests that like many places on earth, Death Valley is heating up even further. Summers have always been hot at Death Valley. But in 2018, Death Valley had it warmest ever July, breaking the record set during 2017, with an average daily temperature of 108.2, six degrees higher than usual.  At the Furnace Creek weather station, the high temperature hit at least 120 degrees on 21 days. On four days, the temperature soared to 127 degrees.  (The highest temperature ever of 131 degrees Farenheit was “reliably recorded” at Furnace Creek on June 30, 2013).

An outdoor museum at the Furnace Creek Ranch showcases wagons, tools, and other artifacts leftover from the 1883-1889 borax mining era at Harmony Borax Works, near Furnace Creek. Various mining operations continued to operate in the park for most of its history, with the last mine closing in 2005.

A  “wet bulb” temperature of 100 degrees F (35 Celsius) and 85% humidity that equals 167 degrees is the maximum heat limit for human survivability, because the body’s cooling system can’t keep pace with the heat (see Leahy source, below).  The NOAA National Weather Service Heat Index shows the combinations of heat and humidity that produce specific “wet bulb” temperatures.

But wet bulb temperatures below 167 degrees also kill people. In 2015, a heat wave that generated wet-bulb temperatures of 122 degree F killed over 3,500 people in India and Pakistan. Chicago experienced a similar heat wave in 1995, and hundreds of people died. Thanks to climate change, we can expect more Death Valley-like days everywhere in years to come.

The Timbisha Shoshone people, who still call Death Valley home, knew how to  survive in this harsh environment. But Death Valley earned its name for a reason. At Furnace Creek, the spring-fed pools and air-conditioned rooms changed our experience of the heat from a threat to a novelty that we could experience, and then retreat from to a cooler environment.  But around the world, millions of people in hot zones — along with plants and wildlife — have no access to a cooler artificial environment. I wonder how we will adapt as major cities around the world routinely experience stretches of Death Valley days.

Being an optimist, or perhaps willfully blind, I’ll end by saying that I look forward to returning to Death Valley, but probably in another season, when birds don’t drop from the sky, and I can spend the entire day outdoors exploring this amazing national resource.

Good-bye, Death Valley, until I return in my camper van (a few years down the road).

Sources and resources

This cool map of Death Valley, from the National Park Service, displays in a couple of different ways.

“Death Valley posts hottest month ever recorded on Earth, for the second July in a row,” by Ian Livingston and Jason Samenow.  The Washington Post, August 1, 2018.

“Parts of Asia May Be Too Hot for People by 2100,” by Stephen Leahy.  National Geographic News, August 2, 2017.

 

Hello to Manzanar

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Back in 7th grade, when I read Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, the wind and sand had buried most remains of the Japanese internment camp that Houston described so eloquently in her 1973 memoir. By the early 1970s, people had pretty much forgotten that the United States detained thousands of its own citizens in internment camps during World War II.

As a 12-year-old, the book blew me away — how could this have happened to families in the United States? I don’t remember asking my parents or grandparents about the camps, and we never learned about them in school. But Jeanne’s story stayed with me. Years later, when I was designing a humanities class called “Multicultural America,” I added her short but powerful book to the reading list. Now, I talk with students about Jeanne’s story, so she’s still with me (and still alive and living in California, as of 2018).

This past summer, I visited Manzanar National Historic Site, just south of Independence, California. As with Jeanne’s book, visiting Manzanar blew me away.

A replica of the original sign for the “Manzanar War Relocation Center.”

If I had come to Manzanar as a teenager, or even in my 20s, there wouldn’t have been much to see. The government dismantled the camp after the war, and the harsh winds of the Owens Valley had blown sand over the gravesites, gardens, and other camp remnants, literally erasing Manzanar and its history.

But thanks to Houston’s book, and the work of Manzanar Committee  — spearheaded by writer/activist and former incarceree Susan Kunitomi Embrey — we won’t forget Manzanar and the nine other detention camps set up for Japanese-American citizens and their older Japanese immigrant relatives.  These older immigrants — the Issei — were not citizens because until the 1952 passage of the McCarran–Walter Act, only white immigrants could become naturalized citizens.

Incarceree Ryozo Kado, a stonemason, built this memorial at the Manzanar cemetery in 1943. The Japanese inscription says “Monument to console the souls of the dead.” During the war, 143 people died in the camp, and 15 were buried here, although only five graves remain, including those of several babies or toddlers.

The residents of Manzanar made the best of a terrible experience, which to some people may suggest that “it wasn’t all that bad.” It sounds pretty bad to me. I can’t imagine the government tell me I had a couple of weeks to get my affairs in order because I was going to be held indefinitely behind barbed wire fences. Many Japanese-Americans lost businesses, homes, and lives they had built for themselves and their families.

Replica of  a family’s assigned room in the barracks at Manzanar.  On the August day that I visited, the temperature had cooled to the high 90s after a long stretch of 100 degree-plus days, which is typical summer weather in the Owens Valley, and this room was hotter on inside than outside. In the winter, cold wind blew through cracks in the hastily-constructed structures.

Life in the camp was extremely stressful, as is always the case when people are packed together in close quarters with little control over their own lives. At one point, a riot broke out in which two people were killed. In her memoir, Jeanne describes her father’s descent into alcoholism, and how the camp impacted family dynamics in other more subtle ways. For example, kids often ate with other children instead of their families, so the feeling of family togetherness gained through eating together was lost.

Replica of the bathroom building at Manzanar. My students always comment on Jeanne’s description of the bathrooms, which lacked stalls; Jeanne’s mother and other older Japanese women found using the bathrooms especially humiliating.

The government selected Manzanar because it was an abandoned town site, with land available for lease from the City of Los Angeles. Earlier in the 20th century, Los Angeles had more or less tricked the local farmers into selling off their water rights, and then drained the once-fertile valley dry by building a series of water-delivery canals. The land was originally home to Paiute Indians, driven off by the military in the 1860s.

Eventually, the involuntary residents of Manzanar built a community here, including basketball courts, numerous Japanese-style gardens, and a shady oasis known as “Pleasure Park.” Kids went to school, mothers birthed babies in a makeshift hospital, and teams played baseball and other sports.

The marker for Pleasure Park, also known as Merritt Park.
The gardens at Pleasure Park.  The Park Service  has excavated these gardens over the past 20 years, as the relentless Owens Valley wind had buried everything with sand. This park would have been lush and green during the war because the internees maintained it as oasis.

Manzanar National Historic Site was established in 1992. Controversy surrounded memorializing the camp from the moment the state of California designated it as  a historical site in 1972, and erected a roadside marker describing Manzanar as a “concentration camp.”  In the 1990s, when the Park Service first began to excavate, develop, and preserve the site, it was flooded with letters of protest, with at least one writer suggesting the camp was a “guest house.”

I’ve come across this desire to sanitize history in my own community, and it’s hard for me to understand. Some people seem to think that we should whitewash “the bad parts,” maybe because they think it reflects poorly on the community (locally) or, in the case of Manzanar, on the United States.

Many of the protestors  were WW II veterans. Perhaps some felt that an official remembrance of the Japanese internees in some way diminished the sacrifices they had made. During the war, they were fighting for an honorable cause. Reminding the country that Americans were held against their will perhaps made the cause seem less honorable. Or perhaps the veterans also felt forgotten. I know some would argue that this push to keep history “clean” results from systemic racism — controlling the narrative helps to maintain power — and I wouldn’t entirely disagree, but it’s complex. History provokes feelings that are often deeply personal.

After the war ended, Japanese-American families left the camps to pick up the pieces of shattered lives. Anti-Japanese sentiment and prejudice remained rampant, as this Manzanar exhibit illustrates.

Visiting Manzanar was an emotional experience for me, and I noticed other visitors dabbing at their eyes as they viewed exhibits. I wanted to ask some questions but had to pull myself together.  I mentioned Farewell to Manzanar, and the ranger told me that their chief interpreter, whose name I later learned is Alisa Lynch, also  was deeply impacted by Jeanne’s story, after seeing the movie version of the book in 1976.  The ranger told me that  lots of families visit Manzanar each year, often because children ask their parents to take them there because they  learned about the camps in school.  Many have read Jeanne’s book.

Sources and resources

“Bitter Feelings Still Run Deep at Camp,” by Martin Forstenzer, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1996.

Dorothea Lange Gallery, Manzanar  National Historic Site, National Park Service. Lange, famous for her Depression-era photos of migrant Dust Bowl families, also took many photographs at Manzanar during World War II.

“Return to Manzanar,” by Nicolas Brulliard, National Parks Conservation Association, Fall 2016.

“Whitewashing Manzanar : Various veterans groups want to (bully) the government into denying the site of its historic meaning,” by Robert A. Jones, April 10, 1996.