Eastern Sierra Regional

Sixty feet of hexagonal basalt columns standing like a wall of stone pipes in the Reds Meadow Valley, just west of Mammoth Mountain. The formation is about 100,000 years old — molten basalt that pooled in a glacial valley and cooled slowly enough that contraction cracks split it into near-perfect six-sided columns. Glaciers later scraped one side flat, exposing the cross-section. The top of the formation is paved with the polished hexagonal tile-tops of the columns, a natural mosaic floor. National Monument since 1911 — Theodore Roosevelt protected it from a proposed hydroelectric dam that would have blown the columns up to make a reservoir. Sister formation to Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and Devils Tower in Wyoming, though far younger than either. Trailhead is at Reds Meadow, accessed by shuttle from Mammoth Mountain in summer; closed by snow most of the rest of the year. A short hike beyond the postpile reaches Rainbow Falls, a 101-foot drop on the Middle Fork San Joaquin River that catches morning rainbows reliably enough to name itself.

A square mile of dust and sagebrush at the foot of the eastern Sierra escarpment — the best-preserved of the ten American concentration camps that imprisoned more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, between 1942 and 1945. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 two months after Pearl Harbor. The first detainees arrived at Manzanar in March 1942; at peak, 10,046 people lived inside its barbed-wire perimeter under armed guard from eight watchtowers. The site sits in Owens Valley between the Sierra Nevada and the Inyo Mountains — a high-desert basin where summer temperatures top 100°F, winter winds whip dust through the barracks, and Mount Whitney looms 14,505 feet over the western horizon. After the camp closed in November 1945, the Army auctioned off the wooden barracks and the place reverted to scrub. Most of what's there now is reconstructed: two barracks, a mess hall, a guard tower, and a stone sentry post. The cemetery monument — a white obelisk built by internees in 1943, inscribed "Soul Consoling Tower" in Japanese — is original. Manzanar became a National Historic Site in 1992. Annual pilgrimage every April.

14,505 feet — the highest peak in the contiguous United States. The eastern face rises 11,000ft from Lone Pine in 12 miles, the most dramatic vertical relief in the country. From Lone Pine Airport (O26) at the base, the cockpit view looking west is straight at granite. Mount Muir, Crooks Peak, and Lone Pine Peak make up the rest of the eastern Sierra crest. Climbers reach the summit via Whitney Portal; the eastern view from Owens Valley shows the full granite face.

The largest tree on Earth by volume. The General Sherman stands 275 feet tall, 36 feet across at the base, and an estimated 52,500 cubic feet of solid wood — bigger by mass than the largest blue whale ever measured. It is not the tallest (that is a coast redwood) and not the oldest (bristlecone pines beat it by a millennium), but for sheer woody substance there is nothing larger alive. Best estimate on age: 2,200 to 2,700 years. It germinated when Athens was still a city-state. Sequoia National Park was established in 1890, the second national park ever (after Yellowstone), specifically to stop loggers from cutting these trees down. The Giant Forest grove contains five of the ten largest sequoias on the planet — General Sherman, Washington, Lincoln, General Grant (in adjacent Kings Canyon NP), and President. Sequoias only grow naturally in a 70-mile band of the Sierra Nevada western slope, between roughly 5,000 and 7,000 feet elevation, where snowmelt feeds them and periodic fire clears the forest floor so their cones can release seeds.