Sequoia / King’s Canyon National Parks

Saturday, October 1

My morning started just like my night had ended – with lots of noise. Let’s hear it for kids playing just outside the van at 7.30 in the morning. Ouch. 

A national park campground on a weekend is clearly not a place to chill. Lesson learned.

And then I looked at the calendar – it was October 1^st. According to my original plans for this trip, I was supposed to be home yesterday. But I’m not – and that’s the fun of this trip. I’ve changed my plans, and it’s awesome. My tenants on Fleetwood Terrace have extended through the middle of October, and I hope to be home before the end of the month. Everything is copasetic. We can continue our dawdle across America ... J

We packed up the van and got ready for the day's dawdle, and we started off onto the Generals’ Highway through Sequoia National Park. We visited the Giant Forest (which contains five of the world’s ten largest trees) ... 

and the AutoLog, a massive sequoia tree onto which you used to be able to drive a car. (The tree has decomposed so much now, though, that it’s no longer possible to drive onto it.)  

We walked around at the Parker Group of sequoias ... 

and then drove to the nearby Tunnel Log. (No, the Champagne Chevy would not fit!)

After that it was on to El Moro, a huge granite dome in the center of the park with an elevation of 6,725 feet. Both Auggie and I climbed the staircase on El Moro, which took us to the tippy top of the dome and gave us fabulous views of the park, the mountains and the Great Western Divide. The staircase was originally built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and I gotta tell ya, I don’t think it would have been me up there on that rock laying those stones and securing those railings. It is a place that would have made my tummy quiver, had those railings not already been there!

But what great views, eh?

And now here is a view of the (yet another!) serpentine General’s Highway (see that little snakey line?) that we drove on through the park. I’m gonna need valium by the time I’m done … 

After a quick lunch, it was on to look at the massive General Sherman Tree. Wow. What I learned here is that General Sherman is neither the world’s tallest nor widest tree. Instead, it has the largest volume in its trunk, qualifying it for the world’s largest. How bout that? A little confusing, no?

But still, it’s both tall and wide – 275 feet tall and 36.5 feet in diameter at its base. They don’t know exactly how old the tree is, but estimate it to be between 1,800 and 3,000 years old! I find that so hard to conceptualize. What did this planet even look like 1,800 years ago?

After we massaged the kinks out of our neck from looking up so high, we drove down to the General Grant Forest and the General Grant Tree in the neighboring King’s Canyon National Park to put those kinks back in. Another massive tree, and this one IS the world’s widest.

General Grant is the world’s third largest tree (by volume again), and has the world’s biggest trunk, at 40 feet in diameter at ground level. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge named it the Nation’s Christmas Tree. (Can you imagine trying to put the star on top of THAT one each year?)

As we had entered King’s Canyon National Park, we stopped to look at this beautiful view. The sign at this pull-out taught us that this view is part of the second largest roadless landscape in the Lower 48 states. (Darn it, the sign didn’t tell us what the first one was.) And the highest summit in the Lower 48 is also in these parks – Mt. Whitney, which rises to 14,495 feet. This is some beautifully powerful nature here!

We left these two parks having seen some stunning territory. We drove back through the nation’s fruit basket toward Fresno, then north to the foothills of Yosemite National Park. Driving in the dark, we finally found a campsite along Bass Lake and set up camp for the night.