After a full Friday of hustling, I landed back at the hutch, we grabbed some food from Gaby's, and hit the road. Nubian Princess and BlackBerry directions got us into Furnace Creek around 2am.
The sun rose, we got up and had breakfast out on the patio with Aunt Caroline and Uncle Ted. Chandler assembled some sandwiches, and we all piled into the car to go run around Scotty's Canyon, waving to the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere on the way.
Paparazzi were out in full force.
The canyon was so colorful, I had to stop often and take too many pictures for my digital rock collection. This here is mosaic rock.
Can you see the man facing the horse with the flowing mane in this one?
There were also formations that reminded me of Park Guell.
There was a lot of feet-crunching-rock noise, with some conversation in between.
Chandler up to no good.
The reverse view.
We got to the end where Scotty was supposed to have hid when the creditors were out to get him - apparently there'd been an old bed under that ledge bit for the longest time. The white specks above the ledge thing are Aunt Caroline and Chandler trying to find the fresh rock fall the park ranger couple had told us about. After taking this shot I sat and waited on a rock, and it was so quiet it hurt my ears.
No rock-fall found, we hoofed it back down to where Uncle Ted was waiting, inhaled our Tofurkey sandwiches and made our way back to the car.
© 2009 C. Evans. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
The sun was disappearing behind the mountains, making them amazing shades of soft purple and blue.It was pretty dark as we bumped down the troad, and back to the hotel. We popped into the General Store to look at hats, cleaned up, had dinner, looked at zillions of stars and slept like champs.
Sunday breakfast on the patio, sandwich assembly and then it was "So long, Furnace Creek Ranch!"
We parked near Eureka Mine and rolled up to Aguereberry Point.
We were up so high, we could see birds cruising below.
More color in the rocks.
Aunt Caroline packed us some sandwich fixin's, and Chandler and I headed off toward Manzanar.
The sun bounced off the tops of the Sierra Nevadas, making them look even more monumental as we approached them heading west.
We passed by Dow's Motel Villa in Lone Pine.
And 9 miles later, arrived at Manzanar. The interpretive center had a good 20 minute intro video. I'd seen photos, and short documentary things at JANM before, but it was still disturbing to see people who looked like my aunts and uncles, smiling and waving to the camera while being loaded onto buses and trucks taking them away from the lives they worked hard to build, into some pretty trying conditions. After the video, we looked at a few of the exhibits inside before heading out to where the barracks used to be.
Chandler helped demo the remains of this structure.
