By NAP staff
▲ Former Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lance Ito, whose parents met at Heart Mountain, and former incarceree Bacon Sakatani talk at the 2023 Heart Mountain Pilgrimage.
The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is arranging a charter bus trip from Los Angeles to Cody, Wyoming, 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 and their family members to attend the pilgrimage, which is scheduled for July 25-27, 2024.
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 at https://www.heartmountain.org/
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 Secretary Norman Mineta and Senator 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 rebecca@heartmountain.org or 503.621.6190.
