I Like Big Bark and I Cannot Lie! Them Other Trees Can’t Deny!
You can beleaf us, Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park epitomize the reasons we have national parks in the first place. While allowing us to enjoy them, we needle these Parks to protect the largest living organisms on earth. These groves of ginormous Sequoia trees are a national treasure, and there are not very many left. The early non-native explorers and settlers in this area envisioned a treasure in the sale of the lumber from the Sequoia. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for us, it turns out that Sequoia wood is not particularly useful for milling into lumber; the wood is brittle and the giant trunks frequently shatter when felled. Too bad this wasn’t discovered before thousands of these majestic giants were cut. Humans, bah.
These two parks were our first stop in California and they did not disappoint. Who wouldn’t love standing next to and marveling at the largest tree in the world? Taking the top spot is the General Sherman Tree (measured by volume of wood in its trunk). Over 36-feet in diameter at its base, it has a girth of 79 feet (measured about 4 feet from the base) and towers skyward 275 feet. Only about 2000 years old, it is a relatively middle-aged Sequoia, and grows bigger each year. Sequoias can live over 3000 years. But Sequoia’s owe their massive size to rapid growth, not age, so the biggest are not always the oldest. And these are not the oldest trees we’ve run into on YOFOAdventures! Some of the Bristle Cone Pines in Great Basin (tiny trees by comparison) are over 4000 years young (see our blog post “In, Around, and Back Again”).
The biggest trees in the world grow from one of the smallest cones.
We were lucky enough to land a campsite in the Azalea Campground at Kings Canyon. Turns out it was just a short trail run away from the 2nd largest tree in the world, The General Grant Tree. We also hiked to a relatively lonely giant Sequoia called the Boole Tree. It sits near a grove of enormous tree stumps. For some unknown reason, the Boole Tree was spared by the lumberjacks. It is the Sequoia tree with the biggest diameter: 40 feet. As with most Sequoia’s it has survived countless forest fires and has the scars to prove it. Sequoia’s are one of those types of coniferous trees that needs periodic fires to open its chicken egg-sized cones and clear the underbrush so the seedlings can thrive.
If these parks were all about their trees, that would be enough, but King’s Canyon is aptly named for the huge gorge carved by the Kings river. 8000 feet at its deepest, King’s Canyon beats Black Canyon of the Gunnison for depth (but Black Canyon still wins for its sheer cliffs and the steepness of the gorge). And unlike Black Canyon, you can drive down into and along King’s Canyon to explore the river, falls, and narrow meadows. The canyon is a mixture of water formed (v-shaped) and glacially formed (u-shaped), so there’s lots of geologic and watery history to see along the 30-ish mile drive. We enjoyed another PBnJ picnic on a hike around Zumwalt Meadow near “Roads End.”
Kings Canyon...pics don't do it justice!
These parks straddle a particularly rugged section of the Sierra Nevada Range and there are no roads into the parks from the east. As we were coming from Las Vegas, we had to go around the mountain range to the south, into California’s central valley, and approach them from the West. Towing the YOFOhome up into these mountains is almost like a thrill ride at an amusement park! Plenty of curvy switchbacks and hairpin turns, often on the edge of sheer drop-off’s without the security blanket of measly guardrail, frequently leaves you with that “light in the nuts” feeling. And, of course, what goes up…
The YOFOtruck did not fit through here.
The parks share a boundary (and park administration), and they both should be on everyone’s bucket list...perhaps number tree behind Yellowstone and Yosemite. The parks left us awestruck at both their scenic beauty as well as the natural wonder of being in the presence of the largest living thing in the world. We didn’t do long hikes here – we took our time and just wandered around the groves staring up and up around in circles, pointing like kids in a candy store: “there’s a big one!” “There’s another big one!” “Check that one out” and the whole lot of “whoas” made the distances secondary to the feelings. As with most parks, we left pining for more. The next park would have to be incredible to top this…next stop: Yosemite.