Majestic Sequoias

 Monday, May 10 for Sunday, May 9 and Monday, May 10, 2021

We began our day with a very nice breakfast prepared by Paul Griffith in honor of Mother's Day. I pitched in a bit, but Janie also helped in the end so everything would come together in a timely manner. After our goodbyes, Randy and I "hit the road" again, but this time in busy Los Angeles and surrounding areas to get out of town and head north. Our goal was Sequoia National Park.

While it was mostly a day of driving, we did see a few sights along the way.

OK, our grandsons both like mandarin oranges a lot, so seeing a company that grows, picks and packages them was funny to us.

Over the two days, we saw plenty of citrus trees, of course, it is California, but here were the mandarin orange trees.

The scenery changed quite a bit. We were driving at higher speeds than our trip on Route 66 -- I really missed that leisurely pace -- so we didn't get as many pictures of the road.

As I said, our goal was to be near Sequoia National Park, and we made it to Three Rivers, California. We stumbled onto The Buckeye Tree Lodge (sign in the opening picture) and figured it was the place for former Ohioans.

Randy likes to take pictures of the non-traditional rooms we have stayed in, showing the good, the bad and the ugly. We thought this one was good. In fact, we discussed through today that this is what a lodge in a National Park should be like. It was quite nice.

We were on the second floor, and this was our view from the deck, overlooking the Kaweah River, which runs from the National Park.

They even had good Internet, so the blog closing out Route 66 got completed Sunday evening.

We checked out and started early Monday, heading into:

Wait, wait, that wasn't us ...

The terrain was a bit rough, but it wasn't like the last few Parks we were in ... it was green and lush.

Randy was fascinated by the Yucca plants in bloom, and how they ran all the way up the mountains.

We were surprised how crowded the park was on a Monday morning, and we thought we were fairly early. We did not take pictures of the crowds, but there was one near tunnel rock, below. Randy found a picture in one of the museums or gift shops that showed way back in black-and-white picture days, the park system allowed cars to drive through and under tunnel rock.

As we've said too often, the camera, no matter how good a camera, cannot capture what the eye sees. For us, we can hope that pictures key our memories, and convey a bit of the beauty and scope of size of what we viewed. 

Moro Rock, below, stood out quite majestically. You may get an idea from below how hazy it was, but as we climbed (in the car, who are we kidding?) higher and higher, we left the haze below us and the mountains stood out very clearly,

Moro Rock again ... and the next few pictures may give an idea of the hairpin turns and twisty roads we traveled all day.

So here we have all these nice pictures, but you haven't seen any sequoias yet, have you? I think it had to be a function of altitude, because we finally climbed (drove) high enough that we began to see them. The key seemed to be getting above 5,000 feet. (For the day, we exceeded 7,000 feet.)

An aside here -- you may remember, I had a Facebook post and maybe put it in the blog, too, that was we were leaving Oatman, AZ we had the highest gas mileage over a number of miles that we had ever had in any of the three Prius we have owned. On this trip, we had the lowest we ever had! You can see below, 33.7 mpg. We weren't driving very fast, in fact, at times we were going about 15 mph. The roads were twisting, turning, and steadily UP. This evening, after coming back "down from the mountain" and driving to our next hotel, we are back to about 52.5 mpg or so.

Our goal was to see the sequoia designated as the General Sherman, which is the largest tree in the world by volume. That means there are trees that are taller, there are trees that are larger around, but if you considered all the wood in the tree, General Sherman is the largest. We haven't gotten there yet, but the picture below shows an outline of what the base of the General Sherman looks like. Randy couldn't get the entire thing into the picture.

To illustrate how huge these trees grow, this is a stump of a tree that had to be cut down because it endangered some rental cabins in the park -- in 1950! Randy is holding my walking stick, pointing up, and still reaches about 3/4 of the way across this stump. By the way, the Park Service eventually moved out all the rental units, so no more sequoias would have to be sacrificed.

We finally got to the General Sherman -- the tree was named back in around 1876 by the man who discovered the tree and named it after the man he served under in the American Civil War.

While the hike down and back to the General Sherman wasn't particularly long, it was a lot easier going down to it (you'll see the long-sleeved shirts, it got chilly there) than it was for old people to climb back up. It was pretty steep. We passed a few winded younger people on the way back.

As our trip in Arizona took us the park shared by the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest, this park was also shared between Sequoia and Kings Canyon park. There were many sequoias within that part of the Park, also.

Randy takes a lot of pictures of information boards through the park to remind us of what we saw. I don't usually put them in the blog, because they are hard to read in small print. This one is included because it is a picture from 1900 of the Monarch, as it is called, a tree that has been dead for many years, and has hollowed out. It was noted as far back as the 1870's as used by people for shelter and storage. It looks the same now, 120 years later, as it did then.

Our last tree to look for in Kings Canyon Park was called the General Grant. It is either the second or third largest tree in the world by volume -- we saw statements claiming both.

Finally, as we were getting ready to leave the parking area, I saw this pile of snow! It was about 65 degrees when we were in that part of the park, and it has been warm recently, but we presume because it was a shaded area, this is snow that was pushed off the parking lot and has not yet melted.

We hope to visit Yosemite National Park tomorrow -- we have some business to care for early, so it may be another two days until we can gather ourselves to organize pictures and thoughts!

THANKS for coming along with us. We hope you have enjoyed sharing our experiences as much as we have enjoyed sharing them.