The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF) is arranging a charter bus trip from Los Angeles to Cody, Wyo., for attendees to its annual pilgrimage in the last week of July.
HMWF leaders decided to sponsor the bus to make it easier for former incarcerees at the Heart Mountain concentration camp for Japanese Americans and their family members to attend the pilgrimage, which is scheduled for July 25-27.
Rates for the bus trip start at $975 for a double room on the route to and from Heart Mountain and $1,299 for a single room. The trip will begin in Los Angeles on July 22 and return on July 30. More details about the trip can be found on the Heart Mountain website: www.heartmountain.org/visit/events/pilgrimage
Pilgrimage organizers hope the event will be the biggest since the 2011 grand opening of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which is on the site of the camp where 14,000 Japanese Americans spent up to 39 months during World War II. The 2011 event was the last time HMWF sponsored a bus trip.
The 2024 pilgrimage will feature the grand opening of the Mineta-Simpson Institute, the new conference center and archive dedicated to the lives and careers of former Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta and former Sen. Alan Simpson, who first met as Boy Scouts at Heart Mountain in 1943.
Kathleen Saito Yuille, a Heart Mountain board member who co-chairs this annual event, said the bus was arranged because of the importance of the 2024 pilgrimage, the need for pilgrimage participants to experience the camaraderie of the trip, and to eliminate many of the complications of traveling from Los Angeles to Cody.
Registration for the bus trip concludes on April 1, and payment for the first half of the fare is due April 30. For more information, contact HMWF Deputy Director Rebecca McKinley at [email protected] or (503) 621-6190.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation preserves the site where some 14,000 Japanese Americans were unjustly incarcerated in Wyoming from 1942 through 1945. Their stories are told within the foundation’s museum, Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, located between Cody and Powell. For more information, call the center at (307) 754-8000 or email [email protected].