Heart Mountain Receives Traveler’s Choice Award From Tripadvisor

The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is the recipient of another award.

This time, the former Japanese-American concentration camp used during World War II, is being awarded the 2023 Traveler’s Choice award from Tripadvisor, the travel service and advice website.

The award is given to sites rated in the top 10 percent of World Travel Destinations by Tripadvisor members. The award is the latest recognition of the historical value and quality presentation of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which opened in August 2011.

Visitors to Heart Mountain can tour a museum that recounts the history of Japanese immigration and the ruinous decision during World War II that forced the removal and incarceration of 125,000 Japanese Americans, including 14,000 at Heart Mountain. The museum also includes “All We Could Carry,” a documentary short film about Heart Mountain by Academy Award-winning director Steven Okazaki.

Tripadvisor members describe Heart Mountain as “amazing,” “thought provoking” and “informative.” One visitor said, “We spent HOURS in there, as the story and history is amazing. We had NO IDEA that these places existed. We were here for the national parks, but spent a day doing this instead. I highly recommend this.”

“Our work at Heart Mountain is a work of passion – for those like myself who are descendants of Heart Mountain incarcerees, as well as for our growing ‘family’ of people who are moved by this story and this site,” says Heart Mountain’s executive director, Aura Sunada Newlin. “We are grateful for the testimonials of our visitors, and for the boost that this recognition brings to Park County.”

The award comes as the Foundation is expanding its exhibits and other facilities, including a restored root cellar in which the camp’s farmers stored their crops, a new exhibit in an original barrack that once housed incarcerated Japanese Americans and the new Mineta-Simpson Institute dedicated to celebrating the careers, lives and values of Secretary Norman Mineta and Senator Alan Simpson who met at Heart Mountain as Boy Scouts in 1943.

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.