From Yosemite, we headed back south towards King’s Canyon.
We were eager to get away from the RV parks, so we had done quite a lot of research on places where a huge RV can park in the national forest. After confirming with one of the forest rangers, we decided to park in between King’s Canyon and Sequoia national parks in the Sequoia National Forest near Hume.
Kitty Itty Bitty enjoyed her many walks.
We found a paved forest service road with a turn off (that was also paved) and parked up off the side of that rarely traveled road. It was a fantastic spot to be. Even on Memorial Day weekend, we saw few cars over the six days.
Campfires kept us very busy.
The parking spot was indicative of our time there. We were able to celebrate Scott’s birthday. He loved his big ticket gift of a Mavic Air drone. I think we are all still very impressed with how amazing the images are and how easy it is to fly.
Thank goodness we had a fire permit. The birthday brownie burned bright!
The first day out exploring the national parks, we drove the fifteen minutes to Grant Grove in King’s Canyon. The General Grant tree was enormous. It made the couple of sequoias we saw in Yosemite laughably small.
A sequoia chopped down over 100 years ago is still in good shape, only now it is a tunnel.
The weather wasn’t so great, so the kids knocked out their junior ranger badges and we spent the next couple of days hiking around our RV and having campfires. We did make the incredible drive down highway 180 so that we could fully appreciate the beauty of The Canyon.
King’s Canyon’s beauty lies in the valleys that glaciers have carved.
Sequoia was a little farther away at almost an hour drive.
It turned out to be well worth the trip. General Sherman (the largest living tree in the world) was one of many very cool sightings.
The pictures of the trees simply don’t show how large they are. This chart gives better size examples.
Caden and Scott weren’t feeling 100%, so they hung back while Keali and I took off to do a couple of mile hike through the Giant Forest. “Giant Forest” is an understatement.
Around every corner was a new and usually shockingly big tree or grove. I was happy we made the stop at the two national parks, and they were really beautiful in their own ways.
The Senate is a grove of trees that likely sprouted at the same time.
By far though, our best memories of these parks will be more focused on where we were camping and all the amazing things we saw there.
A bear track VERY near our camping spot.
A brightly colored red snow flower we spotted. It doesn’t have chlorophyll so can’t perform photosynthesis. Instead, it gets nutrients from fungi.
A triple trunk sequoia near our camping spot. It appeared to be bigger than both the General Sherman and General Grant trees.
We found some deep cracks while on a hike along some of the glacier carved granite. This was was deeper than Caden is tall.
The giant sequoias are fascinating. This tiny cone typically only releases its seeds (each the size of a oat) after a fire. The protective bark of the sequoia can be over a foot thick and protects the parent tree from burning.