The first car ride to Manzanar was silent - the radio was off, and the only sound was the steady hum of the van's massive engine. At the end of a barbed-wire fence that stretched to the horizon, a wooden guard tower ascended into view.
The tower, 20 feet tall with platforms on two sides, overlooks a square mile of land that, six and a half decades ago, hosted the 10,000 people who were forced to live here.
Under the watchful eye of the armed soldiers who stood atop one of eight guard towers that once surrounded the land lived families and strangers of all ages and backgrounds.
But they had a few things in common.
They had slanted eyes and ate rice with most meals. They had ancestors who were warriors and farmers. They were Americans of Japanese descent.
And they were constantly reminded of their incarceration when they looked up and saw the guard towers.
These days, down a remote stretch of Highway 395 between the snow-capped Sierra Nevada and earthy Inyo Mountain ranges, the antiquated-looking replica guard tower serves as a prelude to 800 acres of land that was once dotted with military-style barracks and populated by over 10,000 persons of Japanese ancestry.
Last week, that prison tower greeted two vans of college volunteers.
The students, participants in a CSU-sponsored Alternative Spring Break, will remember the image of the wooden sentinel station long after the trip is over.
"That tower -- seeing that tower -- that's when it hit me," CSU student and co-leader Andrew Stewart said one night around the fire at the group's campsite about five miles north of the one-time prison. "And we're here to preserve it."
These students were here to restore parts of the once-abandoned land to the way it looked in the 1940s when then-President Roosevelt ordered 110,000 Japanese Americans to one of 10 relocation camps across the country, including one in Grenada, Colo., about 130 miles east of Pueblo.
Once the vans were finally parked inside the barbed wire, the students walked at their own paces past a national historic marker on a rock toward the interpretive center.
During World War II, the people imprisoned here constructed this building to be used as an auditorium. Today, it is the educational epicenter of this National Park Service site, where visitors and students come to learn the plight of people banished from their homes to this nowhere in response to the attack at Pearl Harbor, in addition to several thousand years of history in the area.
"Volunteers have really transformed the landscape and many of them brought their stories with them," said Richard Potashin, park ranger and oral historian. "Many of them bring not only manual labor but valuable stories that we're impoverished without."
In the CSU group, there were plenty of stories. There was a history major and a Japanese-language student. Three other students, including this Collegian reporter, had family members locked in these camps. The rest had heard of internment but didn't know many of the specific details.