Lone Pine is well known from the western movies and Mount Whitney, highest mountain in CA (road was closed halfway due to roadworks). The special scenery of the Alabama Hills has been used in many movies eg. Westerns, SF, The Lone Ranger, Iron Man, Star Trek,… A visit at the film museum learned us a lot about the history and in addition, we drove the movie road (dirt road) to view the places where the movies were filmed. After a lazy day we stopped and stayed at a campground in Independence were we enjoyed a self-made shower. Before we left Independence we visited the Manzanar site were American-Japanese citizens were re-located during 1942 & 1945. An impressive site and it gave us more insight on piece of forgotten (for us unknown) but very important history in the US. 10000 US citizens were held captive without any form of conviction. It took until the ‘80s before the government apologized for the ‘race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership’. It learned us that the meaning of a constitution can be interpreted in a subjective way. You could see a lot of similarities in the current world climate. Sometimes it’s hard to learn from the past.
Back on the road, we drove via Big Pine, Bishop towards Mammoth (ski resort). We drove along June Lake, the Mono craters and the impressive Inyo National Forest ( route 120). The scenery changed from desert towards pine wood, towards pine in concrete, lakes and Joshua trees back into desert. We had an overnight at a RV campsite in Dyers. As we needed to return to Vegas for a change of a sensor of Jaak, we drove again along Death Valley and heated up until 34°C with the wind of the hairdryer in our face. We stayed in the Red Canyon NP campsite and today we brought Jaak to the Eurocycles garage.
