My debut visit to California’s Yosemite National Park was met with 4th of July crowds and a prescribed burn. People and smoke … lots of both. Nonetheless, we managed to capture some beautiful pictures of the park.
On the Mist Trail:
Archive for July, 2009
(Note: This was written Thursday, July 2.)
When I first travel to a national park, I have little choice but to be That Guy. I don’t know the lay of the land, I am unfamiliar with the famous landmarks and I yearn to learn about the biggies that make a park worthy of national park designation.
Hence my day as That Guy in Yosemite Valley. An estimated four million people visit Yosemite National Park every year, and most of them squeeze into the approximately two percent of the park that makes up the Yosemite Valley. To say that Yosemite is too crowded is an understatement. The bad news is that being That Guy requires taking my place among those four million in that two percent worth of space.
Far away from anywhere, the snake-like road of King’s Canyon National Park in California offers few amenities for the curious explorer. Due to the unusual layout of the park, in order to travel from the western portion of the park to the eastern portion, drivers have to pass through Sequoia National Forest and Giant Sequoia National Monument. In this non–national park designated part of the drive is the Kings Canyon Lodge, a sleepy cluster of buildings that don’t at all resemble the stereotypical lodge, which offers the only place to get gas in the area.
We pulled into the parking lot. We didn’t see another car. Two tall, tubular devises sat in the middle of the lot. A sign was taped to the device:
King’s Canyon National Park, California.
It’s a far cry from Yosemite National Park in the north and even Sequoia National Park to the south. If you want to experience it, you have to work for it. Traveling to national parks like these are nearly always worth the long and arduous trip.
The road into King’s Canyon is closed through the winter, and it’s easy to understand why. The narrow, winding road balances precariously on the steep banks of the Kings River as it snakes its way back into the far reaches of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
From our campsite in the General Grant’s Grove area, it took us nearly an hour to reach Road’s End. We passed a few lonely businesses — a cave, a gas station, something posing as a sorry little lodge — and only a few cars. Road’s End consists of a large parking lot of few cars, a lone ranger station, a number of backcountry hikers getting ready for long-term adventures and a handful of hard-core day hikers.
There’s something about national park travel that brings out the nature lover in me. And there’s nothing quite like a good picture to capture the natural beauty of the United States.
Thanks to my husband with the photographic eye, here is a sampling of the beauty and splendor of Sequoia National Park in California.
Gnarled roots of a fallen giant sequoia.
There are big trees, and then there are big trees. In Sequoia National Park, there are neither. Instead, there are BFTs (Come on … you know what the “F” stands for.)
The Giant Forest in Sequoia is home to three of the five largest sequoias in the world. Straight, tall, wide, plentiful. It’s tempting to say that if you’ve seen one big tree, you’ve seen them all, but I don’t think that’s true at all. Like people, each tree seems to have its own personality. In fact, the park has named many of the trees after people — McKinley, Roosevelt, Grant, Lee … even Susan B. Anthony and Clara Barton (a personal favorite). I was hoping to find a John Muir tree, but when I asked about the names, the park ranger told me there wasn’t a Muir tree, and, in fact, they stopped naming trees because people were so focused on the names they forgot to focus on the trees.
Traveling in national parks is different than traveling in other places. It’s funny to think we spent a whole day hiking around looking at trees, but the stateliness and expansive height of these trees also makes them unworthy of the ordinary title of “tree.”
