Sequoia National Park
July 19, 2009 – 1:47 pmOver July 4th weekend I had the pleasure of finally going to Sequoia National Park. I have always loved trees and I have always had an interest in wooden objects. And for as long as I can remember I have wanted to visit Sequoia.
I’ve been meaning to sit down and write about my trip since the day I got back. I usually write in a journal when I travel, but my current journal is full. In lieu of a hand-written entry I thought I would share my experience on my blog instead.
My girlfriend and I arrived on the Thursday night before the 4th and checked into our tent cabin at Grant Grove, which is actually located in Kings Canyon. Sequoia and Kings Canyon are administered as one park, so we decided to stay at the midway point between The Giant Forest (in Sequoia) and Cedar Grove (also in Kings Canyon).
We spent our first full day in the park (Friday) at the Giant Forest. The star attraction is the General Sherman Tree, which is the world’s largest tree (it’s also recognized as being the world’s largest living organism). It isn’t the tallest or the widest, but the most massive.
I’ve been to Muir Woods and seen the coastal redwoods (related to the sequoias). These trees actually grow to be taller than sequoias, but not as wide, nor as massive. Nothing prepares you for your first experience with these giant sequoias. Simply put, they are HUGE. HUGE. HUGE. HUGE. They are such well-proportioned trees, though, that it is tough to get a real sense of how big these trees actually are. Certainly photographs do no justice to their true size, but even when you are standing in front of a sequoia it’s not always clear how big they are.
I think their size is simply too massive for a human brain to completely conceptualize! It’s something I struggled with for the entire weekend. No matter how hard I looked or how often I looked the size of the sequoias never quite hit me.
The weekend ended up being one full of hiking. Over 20 miles. This was a huge distance for me! I love playing sports, but hiking is not normally an activity I enjoy so much. Needless to say, this hiking was different and though we were both completely wiped at the end of every day, it was incredible.
Sequoia National Park is a tourist-friendly park. What I mean by that is that the main attractions are easily accessible by car and bus. People can hop out, take a quick look, and continue on. But the beautiful aspect of the park is that as long as you are willing to walk a little it’s fairly easily to get away from the hordes quickly. So that’s exactly what we did.
We went on an absolutely gorgeous hike, walking among the giants of the forest. I continually stopped, looked at the trees around me, and tried to make myself take as many mental pictures as possible. There is so much beauty in the park that (as with the size of the trees) it’s tough to take it all in.
There are no more grizzly bears (brown bears) left in California. At one time there were actually 10,000 of them in the state, but as humans often tend to do, they killed them ALL. However, there are black bears and mountain lions in the park, both of which I was dying to see in the wild. We kept walking by people saying they had just seen a bear (if not two of them!) just ahead of us, but we kept missing them. I resigned myself to the fact that it probably wouldn’t happen on this trip and of course that’s when I spotted one! It was a smaller (younger?) bear, doing exactly what the video we had watched earlier that morning said they do. Scratching around in a fallen log for insects and grubs. There were no other people around and watching the bear in its element was a main highlight of the weekend!
We finished our hike by walking around an amazing meadow in the middle of the forest and then headed back to Grant Grove. We were tired, but completely content. What an incredible day!
We celebrated Independence Day by driving out to Cedar Grove and hiking up to Mist Falls. It was a completely different experience than our hike the day before, but it was also very enjoyable. The waterfall itself is beautiful and the mountain scenery surrounding it is stunning. After about 10 miles of hiking we ended the day with an absolutely incredible (beautiful, stunning, etc.), short 1.5 mile hike around Zumwalt Meadow. Just as words don’t come in very useful when attempting to describe sequoias, there isn’t a good way to describe how beautiful the Cedar Grove area is. You’ll just have to take my word for it!
On our last day, we paid a visit to the General Grant Tree. Not quite as large as General Sherman, but equally as impressive. We continued on to Converse Basin, which is actually a sad place to visit. Converse Basin had one of the largest groves of sequoias in the world, but loggers decimated it, destroying what would have been an amazing sight to see.
They did leave one tree standing, called the Boole Tree, which you have to hike out to see. It’s quite the experience because the Boole Tree comes out of nowhere. Seeing a full-grown sequoia by itself surrounded by much smaller trees, put into perspective a little more for me just how big these trees are. We had the tree all to ourselves and spending 20 minutes just hanging out around its massive trunk (wider than the Sherman and Grant trees) was calming and peaceful. All human sense of time just stops when hanging out with a sequoia. And I really enjoyed that.
It was unfortunately time to head back to San Francisco. For the duration of the drive home I felt the park trying to pull me back. It’s a magical place and one to which I will definitely return.
(This picture is off General Sherman. Looking up from its trunk, you get a pretty good sense of both how tall and how wide sequoias are!)
(This picture is of General Grant. It has a beautiful canopy and you can see the enormous branches coming off the top. Some of these branches are bigger than any full-grown tree on the East Coast!)
