day73

Day 73 (November 1, 2006) - Kings Canyon and Sequoia N.P.

Nope. It wasn't 40 miles last night. We decided to keep going and I drove another 124 miles while Petr was sleeping! We slept just outside the parks, not to waste any precious time. Bakersfield, CA just saw us in time for breakfast. I realized one thing: if you live in LV, it takes you at least 5 hours of driving to get anywhere else, and once you get "anywhere else" you want to leave the place behind! This is sad, sad, sad.

We get to the park and the ranger informs us that due to construction the road through the park will be open for just a few minutes every hour on the hour. We are lucky: it's 10:05 and we just missed the opening. We need to kill 55 minutes between the Visitor Center and the first 10 miles in the park. We meet up with 2 your rangers who are scouting the woods nearby: they are carrying a radar and are collecting collars that the bears have shed the night before. They were scheduled to fail and be collected today, they contain data since March that will tell scientists a lot about bear habits in this area. They tell us there are about 15 bears here, including a mother with 2 cubs. Much to my dismay, we don't see any. We see a lot of giant sequoias though. These are different from the coastal ones, they are not as tall but they are much wider in diameter and have a thicker canopy.

After we pass the road construction, we stop at the museum and take a stroll in a sequoia grove. It's a mixture of "normal" pine trees and giant sequoias, the forest is not quite as thick as on the coast and the trees don't look so menacing. We take another stroll to see the famous General Sherman, the largest tree (by mass) in the world, and still growing: every year it grows of a mass comparable to a new tree. Its bark is 30 inches thick. There's a trail next to it that goes through The Senate, another grove of giants.

Kings Canyon and Sequoia are twin parks, managed together and linked by the same road. Since we switched to daylight-saving time we have 1 precious hour less of sunlight, and this impacts our visit at Kings Canyon. It's a drive-in/drive-out type of visit, we barely make to the end (Cedar Grove) by means of a billion switchbacks that take us to the bottom of the canyon. We simply stop along the road to take pictures and take a look at the river down below. We exit the park with the sun going down (and it's just 4:45pm) and drive all the way to Oakhurst, just below the south entrance to Yosemite National Park.

During the drive, Petr has a confession to make: he says he has had enough of national parks by now and looks forward to doing something different. I think he is suffering of NPBOS (National Park Burn-Out Syndrome). I won't comment, but I must admit that the prospect of soon being in San Francisco sounds quite appealing to me too...