We got up pretty early, actually had breakfast with real coffee at a Starbucks, and left town about 8:30. It took about 1 1/2 hours to get to the entrance to the King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, which are partly connected and partly “glued” together by strips of National Park. We decided to head directly South into Sequoia National Park on what’s known as the Generals Highway, since it connects two gigantic Sequoia trees, General Grant (which we didn’t see) and General Sherman (which we did see). We stopped many times on the way through the park and had a really good time, partly because although busy, the park wasn’t crazy-busy. Our first stop (by now it was after 11) was the Lodgepole visitor center, where we had to get tickets for our later cave tour (see below) and also picked up some sandwiches/wraps for lunch. We took those to the picnic area by the big sequoia grove of which “General Sherman” is a part, and had an early lunch before we went on a short 3-mile hike through the grove. “General Sherman” is pretty impressive, at + 100 feet circumference (the largest tree in the world by that measure, although others are taller, older, etc.), but it was the sheer number of trees in the grove that was really mindboggling. Many have huge burn scars, which they can survive, but others were black stumps of enormous height, and some had come crashing down, too. There were two spots on the trail where the park people had cut “tunnels” in fallen trees for the trail to go through; at others, you could just see the trees close by or at a distance and marvel at how enormous they were. Especially in groups, they were very impressive (although it was rather silly that one was called Senate and another House, and the whole thing was the “Congress Trail”).
After this hike, we went on to check out Moro Rock, a small version of the many granite domes we’d seen in Yosemite–but one with steps carved in it and either a rock “wall” or a railing on both sides of the entire trail. So I had no trouble getting up to the very top and looking down, and I was very grateful to the National Park Service for building a safe trail like that, even as it messes with the natural environment. Because I could never gone up Half Dome with those cables, but this was fabulous.
After this stop, we went on to the Crystal Cave–the only visitable one of the 300 caves in this park, in which the mountains and hills mostly granite / marble, and therefore lends themselves to cave creation, I guess. We hiked down a beautiful trail along a cascading creek to the cave, and had a fascinating tour through it. Mark was skeptical that any of his photos would turn out, but the marvels of stalagmites, stalagtites, fascinating calcite formations, and the very sensibly named curtains and draperies, came out pretty well in some of the photos he took. I especially liked a set of stalagtites that looked like huge organ pipes, and a spot where the calcite had formed a sort of rock waterfall. It was a fascinating environment, and the guide even turned the lights off on us at one point, to give us that incredible sensation of total darkness. We hiked back up and made our way out of the park, through some pretty hefty construction projects that were supposed to delay us by 20 minutes, but didn’t even cost us 10. We did look at a lovely mountain river swimming spot, but it was getting late, so we headed out of the Southern entrance of the park instead and went wet for about an hour, to find a hotel and some Mexican food for dinner in the somewhat dead town of Hanford.
It was another long day, but a very nice park, and seeing the cave and the massive trees in the Grove were both really special.