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!)

What makes feeling successful even more incredible is when it’s the result of a journey.  A journey of some sweat and some tears, a journey like most, with its undulating ups and downs.  Its highs and its lows.

What defines success for me, may not be what defines success for you.  How amazing is that?  There is no average score to meet, no grade on what you consider to be your successes.  The only true aspect of being successful that matters is the feeling of accomplishment that you are able to take away from your experience.  It might just be another small piece of life’s journey, but as with all of life’s small details, we would be better served to enjoy it.  Every last micro-second.

I was sitting outside, sipping on a cappuccino at one of my two new favorite cafes in San Francisco, with book in hand, enjoying the fact that I wasn’t in the sweltering Washington DC heat and humidity typical of the summer months there.  I was taking a bit of a break from my all encompassing job search, which as positive as I have tried to keep myself, has definitely been a struggle at times.  Across from me was the cafe’s garbage bin, and as I glanced up from my book, a homeless man walked up to the bin, rummaged through it for about ten seconds and then pulled out a partially eaten pastry, and ate the rest of it.

Many of us have been told at some point by parents, grandparents, and friends to appreciate what we have, and not to focus on what we don’t have.  I certainly fail at doing this way too much.  But this was one of those instances that I did appreciate what I have in my life: an incredible girlfriend, a loving family, and great friends, along with a place to sleep at night and food to eat throughout the day.  I was made to realize once again that things are usually not as bad as we sometimes might think they are.

I hadn’t seen my friend in over three years, and the first time I met his soon to be wife was the evening before the rehearsal dinner. Exactly two days before the wedding! Rather then getting into how much I liked her (which of course I did), or how wonderful it was to see my friend after such a long absence (indeed it was), I would like to describe what I witnessed at 6:00 PM on Sunday, August 3, 2008.

Love. Love in its most pure and magical and moving form. That was what I saw reflected in the bride’s eyes as the marriage ceremony progressed. I can’t speak for her exact emotions or what she thinking at the time, but from my vantage point she was the picture of complete happiness and contentment in binding herself for all eternity to her groom.

Then I realized the emotion that I was feeling, and it was also one of complete happiness. A rich and full happiness that my friend had found his other. That he had found someone glowing from every inch of her face simply because he was the one standing opposite her on this day.

Though I am an emotional individual (to say the least), I am certainly not a big crier. In this instant, though, I had to literally fight back the drops forming in my eyes because it’s not every day that you see love so plainly and simply expressed on someone’s face.  What an incredible reminder of the most powerful of all human emotions.

By “it”, I mean the absolute silence in the rail car I was in. It was standing room only, though we weren’t completely packed in like sardines, and I was waiting for a seat to open up so that I could read. We had just finished passing through an especially noisy section of underground tunnel (the screeching of the rail cars on the rails is terrible). As the noise quieted down, I suddenly noticed that everyone was silent. I mean, no one was talking.

I was actually startled. I just couldn’t believe my ears. I looked down both ends of the car, and couldn’t find any moving lips. People were either sleeping, reading, listening to music, using their computers, or simply sitting/standing. As I previously mentioned, at some point in my life I must have been in a silent bus, train, tram car, etc., but never before was I aware of silence like I was in this rail car. Aren’t there usually at least a couple of people carrying on a conversation in a packed rail car?

Why were we all so quiet? There was no sign that said “No Talking, Punishable by Death”. It wasn’t as if we were under martial law and were afraid to say the wrong thing. There are so many situations in life where it is completely impossible to get people to be quiet. But here I was in a rail car and all of us were voluntarily being silent.

I don’t have anything terribly insightful to say about this experience. Mostly just that it surprised me so much, I was almost scared by it. One thought did come to me, though. A defining characteristic of the human species is our ability to speak. Isn’t that what many of us love to do for a large part of each day? And here no one was speaking…

I just couldn’t get over that fact for a minute or so, and finally I shook it off, and turned my thoughts elsewhere.  Soon it was time to get off.