Kings Canyon & Sequoia

Upon leaving the bay area (Wednesday, May 23^rd), Kimbal and I drove straight to King’s Canyon/ Sequoia National Park and set up camp. We wanted to make sure that we got there pretty early in the week, since the coming weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and we were pretty sure the campgrounds would fill up. Well, getting there on Wednesday was plenty early and we got an excellent campsite in a grove of large cedar trees overlooking a small meadow in the Kings Canyon Sentinel campground. All of the campgrounds did end up filling up, but not until late Friday night. We spent Thursday through Sunday enjoying all that the two parks had to offer. In Kings Canyon we were wowed by the raggedness of the valley – to us, the valley looked like something out of the lord of the rings: primeval and not really of this world. We did two great day hikes in the canyon, one to mist falls, and the other to a place called “Cedar lookout point”. On the mist falls trail we saw a bunch of King snakes (they eat rattle snakes). We didn’t see any rattle snakes, but we passed some people on the trail who had a rattle snake shake his rattle at them! The falls were beautiful, as were the views of the canyon, here are some pictures:

At Sequoia, we saw a greater variety of wildlife: trout in the streams, pikas, yellow bellied marmots, deer, and a bear! We saw the bear soon after we arrived in the park, and thought it was a taste of more to come, but alas it was our only bear sighting on the trip thus far. We did several short hikes to get a flavor of the variety of landscapes in the park (saw the Sherman Tree, walked out on Moro Rock, hiked the Tharps Log trail past some beautiful meadows) and we did a long day hike up to some alpine lakes (Heather and Aster lakes). We also took a tour of Crystal Caves. The alpine lakes hike was absolutely breathtaking (both beautiful and strenuous) and it was a nice taste of the high Sierra Nevada. The Tharps log trail was also really peaceful, and we could tell a lot of bears like to visit the alpine meadows on a regular basis given the large amounts of scat that we saw. The big trees were cool too, although Kimbal and I have decided that we are partial to the giant Redwoods. Here are some of our pics from Sequoia: