Yosemite

Let me get this out of the way right away: We were disappointed in Yosemite National Park.

There, I said it. Or wrote it, I guess. Nothing like ripping off the Band-Aid to start a blog post.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about Yosemite, shall we? First of all (and I realize this may contradict my opening statement a bit), I'm not saying Yosemite was disappointing. Just that it didn't measure up to everything we hoped it would be. The place is gorgeous and we had some incredible experiences in the Park (I'll get to those), but to put it quite succinctly, we've had better in National Parks elsewhere. And I think I expected too much.

Go with me here a bit.

When I think of the greatest National Parks in the United States, two names instantly pop into my head: Yellowstone and Yosemite. Maybe some people would think of the Grand Canyon or Rocky Mountain or Glacier or some other place based on some amazing experience they have had in a particular park or whatever. But for me, it is (or was, I guess) Yellowstone and Yosemite. Those for me are supposed to be the creme de la creme, the alpha dogs, the cat's meow, just pick whatever saying you use for the best. It's those two. I've been to Yellowstone National Park twice. I had one of the best vacations ever in Yellowstone. I love the place. I figured Yosemite would be on par with Yellowstone. That's maybe unfair to Yosemite.

I suppose one of the reasons I considered those two parks to be the best before this year's Yosemite visit is because they were the first two. Yosemite was the first place to be set aside for public use and protection from development when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864. Yellowstone became the first United States National Park when the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872.

But they are not the same. Or at the same level.

Our first view of El Capitan. The smoke is from a controlled fire.

Let me spend a couple more paragraphs on Yellowstone vs. Yosemite. I'm not trying to bash Yosemite here. I'm really just trying to explain my biases. Really. Different people like different things. I think it's important to explain my point of view, because your own point of view may be totally different from mine, and you might think Yosemite blows away Yellowstone. And if you think that way, I think that's just fine.

If I were to boil the two parks down to their most basic components, I see Yosemite as granite cliffs, waterfalls and meadows and I see Yellowstone as tons of wildlife, varied landscapes and geothermal features. In a battle between those two things, I'm Yellowstone all the way. I spent the better part of four days in Yellowstone in the fall of 2020 and could have done twice that much time there. 

Now, I also believe I needed more time in Yosemite this year and I'd give it a second shot under different circumstances. But I'd still go back to Yellowstone first despite having spent a lot more time there already.

Vernal Fall.

So why was Yosemite not all I imagined it would be? Well, I'll tell you and then we can get onto what we loved about this Park. All this negativity (and it's not really that, honest) is getting old already. Let's get to what we loved after this next section. 

So first of all, there were parts of Yosemite that were closed due to damage caused by winter storms and the ensuing snowmelt doing things like washing away roads. Tioga Road, which runs the entire width of the Park north of Yosemite Valley, was closed in its entirety. We had a notion to go all the way to Tolumne Meadows if we had time and if not, then maybe as far as Olmsted Point. Neither of those options was available and honestly, we probably wouldn't have had time anyway considering the couple of days we budgeted in and around the Park. But we did want to go up to Glacier Point and take in the view of the entire Valley from above and maybe, take a hike up there. But no dice. Also shut down completely. That was for sure a disappointment.

Secondly, there were too many people there. I know, we picked like the week or maybe two weeks after most school systems in the entire United States are done with classes to take a trip out to Yosemite and therefore probably set ourselves up for this spectacularly, but it was honestly packed. Too many cars and people everywhere. I believe here that the parts of the Park that were closed potentially made the too many people issue even worse. I have no evidence to support that statement, but it stands to reason that if more parts of the Park were open, maybe some of the crowds would be out at the other areas rather than in the Valley. I might be wrong here, but it makes sense to me.

Thirdly...no bears. Yes, there are bears in Yosemite. No, we didn't see any. For this trip, that was OK. We saw plenty in Sequoia.

And finally, the Park is bigger than we thought it would be and we didn't allocate enough time. Now, is this Yosemite's fault? Absolutely not. But it factored into our experience. Yosemite Valley is BIG. It's also heavily wooded. And it's difficult to comprehend exactly what it is we were supposed to be looking at. Look, ultimately, there are a lot of gorgeous views in Yosemite National Park. Is that a bad thing? For sure...no. But it might affect one's appreciation on the first visit. I believe it did for us. The size of the place was a surprise to me.

Granite cliffs and a waterfall (it might be Yosemite Fall) (top). Steller's Jay (bottom).

So what did Yosemite have going for it? Well, quite honestly, it had a lot going for it.

First of all, the granite cliffs, waterfalls and meadows that I distilled the Park down to earlier in this post are just absolutely (and I know I already used this word a lot in this post already...) gorgeous and there are a lot of them. And I do mean a LOT. And more is for sure definitely better here. Every view from the valley floor that wasn't obscured by trees was just amazing. The grey cliffs in the sunlight providing a backdrop to lush verdant swathes of grass were everywhere and were impressive every time we laid eyes on them, whether it was from the car, on a hike or just walking from the main village over to the historic Ahwahnee Hotel that is the jewel of the all the Park's lodging properties. 

There are several iconic granite peaks in Yosemite and we got some signature looks at both Half Dome at the east end of the Valley and El Capitan towards the center. It was admittedly difficult for us to make out Sentinel Dome or any of the other peaks scattered around the perimeter, although I wouldn't be surprised if someone more knowledgeable than me about the Park were to look through our photographs and point some of them out. Heck, there might even be some of those in this post. But the only two we could confidently I.D. were Half Dome and El Capitan.

I have to say that we did wonder if Yosemite Valley would be remarkably different from the terrain we drove through to actually get to the Park. I had read stories of this valley being obviously worthy of preservation for everyone in a number of sources and was curious to see if we could notice any difference when we got there. We did. This place is clearly more spectacular than any of the other canyons and valleys and gulleys and whatever that we traversed on our two round-trip drives to Yosemite from Mariposa, where we stayed for two nights so we could get to and from the Park.

I also wondered if there would be people free-climbing El Capitan while we were there. A couple of years ago (before we cancelled this trip in 2020, if I'm remembering correctly), I watched the movie The Dawn Wall, the story of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson's free-climb ascent of El Capitan's wall of the same name. These people that do this sort of thing (not just Caldwell and Jorgeson) are crazy, climbing hand over foot without any support from above up the giant cliff, including taking food and tents or whatever they use for sleeping in at night while they are part the way up the cliff. And sure enough, there was at least one pair climbing the wall when we were there. I can't imagine what makes people want to do this but I'm sure the rush of completing that climb is just incredible. More power to them and Godspeed. Not something I'd ever be interested in doing but I'm glad we laid eyes on these climbers. We saw a group ascending Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming a couple of years ago. Both were impressive to see being climbed but El Capitan won this contest. There's absolutely nowhere to rest or lose concentration.

The Dawn Wall is a good watch, by the way.

El Capitan in the sun (top). And some folks free-climbing up the face (bottom).

The second thing about Yosemite that was awesome was ironically also one of the reasons for making it not so great. The winter weather that washed out roads and closed parts of the Park and drove everyone to the Valley floor (again...speculation on my part) also made the meadows in the Valley super green and created a rushing, roaring Merced River running right through the center of the Park.

We were told that the winter rains and snows and subsequent snowmelt filled the Merced up with three times the volume of water for a typical late June. You could tell. The river was just a series of super aggressive rapids in spots, particularly along the Vernal Fall trail and right near the sign at the entrance at the Park along El Portal Road. There is a rock that blocks about half the river near that sign which you can walk out onto so that you are pretty much right in the center of the river. The power of the water rushing down the riverbed was palpable while standing on that rock. It's an awesome experience to witness a huge volume of water running down a canyon at speed, particularly when you can get so close but are also in no danger of actually being affected by the torrent. Just don't slip.

All that water not only made the Merced more spectacular, it probably made every waterfall in the whole Park more impressive. I have seen a number of waterfalls in the past 10 years while traveling around this country and the world and with the possible exception of Multnomah Falls in Oregon, I'm not sure I've seen any that were better than Yosemite's. And there were at least five that we saw. My favorites were Bridal Veil Fall towards the west and of the Valley and the Cascades which were outside of the Valley to the west. I am sure we got lucky with both of these being way more full than they would normally be at this time of year. 

Cascades, Yosemite National Park.

We also loved the hiking at Yosemite. All of the beauty of the Park's meadows and cliffs and all that water everywhere made for some gorgeous backdrops and pathways on the hikes that we picked out for our one full day in Yosemite. We opted for the Vernal Fall trail up until the point where we got a pretty good look or looks at the Fall and the Mirror Lake trail all the way to the lake itself, which was supposed to be so still that it produces a picture-perfect reflection of Half Dome on its surface.

I thought Vernal Fall was a great hike, probably more so for the walk down and the scenery that was at our back on the way up. I thought the Fall itself was less something to see than everything else that we saw along that trek. Mirror Lake suffered a little bit from all that abundant snow melt. It was actually running while we were there and did not deliver on that reflection that was promised in our Yosemite guidebook. Oh well. 

The water at Mirror Lake was super cold by the way, which was very welcome on an almost summer day after a mile or so hike.

The Merced River near the sign at the Park entrance.

There are two things that I would definitely recommend doing in Yosemite based on our day plus in the Park. One is spending 15 or 30 minutes at Tunnel View towards the west end of the Valley. We did this stop as the very last thing we did before leaving the Park for good. As an overview of the layout of the Valley, it's a must see stop. You can see the whole place laid out before you right from one viewpoint. I wish we had gone here first on our full day in the place but our urgency in wanting to grab a good parking spot near Yosemite Village made us postpone this to late in the day. Mistake probably, although admittedly we thought we were heading up to Glacier Point to get an over-the-park view of the Yosemite Valley before reaching the sign that said that part of the Park was closed. We planned on stopping at Tunnel View anyway after the view at Glacier Point. We just ended up settling for the former and the former alone.

The second thing I'd recommend is spending some time after sundown looking up at the stars. 

I don't know what it is about being able to see stars that is such a source of wonder for me. I can't tell a star from a planet under most circumstances and I'm hopeless with constellations despite owning a constellation chart. I just don't get how these random collections of stars are supposed to resemble anything that looks like a picture. On a good day, I can maybe pick out the Big Dipper and maybe the three stars in a line that make up Orion's belt. But everything else about the heavens? Hopeless.

But put me out in a super dark spot at night away from city lights or any other sort of glow and give me a sky full of stars and I'm hooked. Especially if there's someone there to tell me what it all means. And lucky for us the Yosemite Conservancy conducts stargazing tours at nights for people like me who love looking at the stars but can't make any sense whatsoever of what I am looking at.

The Big Dipper (and a few more stars) as seen from the baseball diamond.

Just after the sun set behind the cliffs to the west of the Park, we set out from the Valley Visitor Center parking lot and took a quick stroll over to the high school baseball diamond within the Valley and laid down on a tarp and just looked up and listened to our guide, Cory, talk to us about what was in the sky above us. I know will not retain most of what he told us but I now know that constellations are really just a way of mapping the stars in the sky. They are not necessarily supposed to look like what their names project, and Cory interpreted some of the constellations in a different way than they are portrayed in the "official" version of the night sky. I will also remember that you can find the star Arcturus (one of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere) by following the curved handle of the Big Dipper (or the Plough, if you are English) until you come to something bright. Arc to Arcturus.

I was thrilled, by the way, that I could identify the Big Dipper on my own without any help. It's the small things, sometimes.

There's only so much detail that I can take when talking about the stars. I'm OK with the fact that there are other planets and suns out there but thing like the Big Bang Theory and stars exploding and things like that kind of freak me out. I'm content to just follow along with the super-powered laser pointer and have someone walk me through the names and maybe look through a telescope before heading back to the hotel and getting some shut-eye. And that's exactly what we did at Yosemite. As a bonus to the Park itself, this experience was perfect. It's so rare living next to a city that we get to see any stars. It's amazing when you truly get out in the middle of true darkness and can see them all. 

To me, the memories I'll take from Yosemite are the views of the meadows, the power of the Merced River, the view from Tunnel View and the time we spent looking up to the sky and learning one or two things (literally, that's all I will retain) about the night sky. Definitely worth a visit. We just hoped for more. Maybe one day when we have a little more time in our lives, we'll stop by again. This time when school is still in session.

The view from Tunnel View. Bridal Veil Fall is toward the center of the frame.

A couple of final notes about Yosemite. I've made reference to the Park being crowded a number of times in this post. We first arrived in the Park for the stargazing and passed a caravan of cars leaving the place for the night while we were on our way in. Understandably then, the Park was less than packed when we first arrived. We also found plenty of parking the next morning when we arrived at the Visitor Center parking lot at about 8 a.m.

But there are for sure warning signs on the way in of just how crowded Yosemite can get. On both trips into the Park, we noted amusement park-style signs noting the expected wait times to get to Park entrance station. We passed signs along the road from Mariposa for waits of 15, 20, 30 and 60 minutes. We sailed past them all and found no wait whatsoever but I wouldn't want to be a in a 60 minute queue to get through the gate. And the fact that the signs top out at an hour doesn't mean the wait doesn't extend beyond that time.

After our two morning hikes to Vernal Fall and Mirror Lake, we headed back to our car to eat our lunch and every passing car stopped to ask if we were leaving. We said no every time, including to the one car where we heard the girl in the back seat say "That's not very nice." I assume she was addressing us but what are we supposed to do? Take our lunch somewhere else and eat it? There were no picnic tables in sight. I know I've said this before but...early bird...worm. That's all I have on Yosemite.

Happy after a couple of morning hikes. At Mirror Lake.

Bear!

For the first couple of years that I was writing this blog, the focus of our travels was primarily city-based. You know...museums, food, notable buildings, history, sports, that sort of stuff. Things that are related to human beings and the settlements they create and things they spend their time doing. We spent lots of time in Europe, visited Morocco to check Africa off the continents list and hit some cities in the United States. Sure, we dipped our toes into nature a bit by walking on a glacier in Iceland and exploring Everglades National Park in Florida but we spent most of our time on asphalt and concrete and not so much in the natural world.

Then we visited Southern Africa in August of 2015 and our travel plans started to shift. It seems like at least half or maybe more of the time we've spent on the road since that trip has been spent outdoors. Hiking or driving in jaw-dropping natural places or chasing wildlife have become some of our favorite things to do. Our California trip in late June this year was a bit of both of those travel styles for us: some time eating and wining in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys preceded by some time immersed in the great outdoors in Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

As we do every time we head into a National Park out west, we hoped we'd see some wildlife being genuinely wild, but we knew in the three parks we picked to visit that our options would be more limited than some of the other parks we've visited on the left side of the Mississippi River. These parks are not stocked with elk or bison or moose like Yellowstone or Grand Teton or Rocky Mountain. There are also no grizzly bears or wolves roaming the Parks' real estate. Yes, there is a grizzly bear on the California state flag but it's been over a century since there's been a grizzly seen in California.

That meant we'd be hoping for birds, bighorn sheep, mountain goats and black bears. We thought it unlikely we'd find any sheep or goats in the Sierra Nevadas and the birds that are resident in the parks didn't excite us overly much. So we pinned all our hopes on bears. Yep, we were relying on the animals that we barely saw in previous travels in Colorado and Wyoming and Montana to make this trip an animals trip. We are fools, I know.

We got so lucky.

If you had asked me before I started planning this trip where I thought I was mostly likely to see a bear, I would have said Yosemite. I mean, have you seen the old black and white movies from the '50s and '60s of people feeding bears from the windows of their cars in Yosemite? While I didn't figure there would be rampant, unabashed hand-feeding of bears, I figured maybe there would be some around. Yosemite seemed to be the place for bears. Sequoia is just about big trees, isn't it? And honestly, I'd never even heard of Kings Canyon until I started mapping out the trip. 

It had to be Yosemite that we'd see the bears, right? Right?

We didn't see any bears in Yosemite. There are bears in Yosemite National Park. Somewhere. As there are in Sequoia and Kings Canyon. We just didn't see any in Yosemite. In fact, after researching all three parks and planning the route for this trip, we actually planned on coming up empty in Yosemite. It just didn't seem like there would be any spot that we'd be visiting that stood any sort of halfway decent chance of seeing a bear.

The bears park on this trip (post-planning) was supposed to be Kings Canyon. It sounded to us like Zumwalt Meadow at the very eastern part of the Park would be the ideal place to head first thing in the morning and with a handful (but not too many) of other early bird tourists, we might spot a bear or two foraging for berries or grubs or whatever in some gorgeous Sierra Nevada Mountain meadow, lush and green from the winter and spring snow and rains. It sounded like an idyllic picture postcard view of nature and one of America's greatest alpha predators.

Crescent Meadow, Sequoia National Park.

Zumwalt Meadow was closed. So was most all of Kings Canyon National Park. The winter of 2023 was brutal in the Sierra Nevadas in terms of rain and snowfall and the after effects of all that water included a few roads here and there being out of commission when we were hanging around California in late June. No bears in Yosemite. No bears in Kings Canyon either. We were left with Sequoia for the bears.

Can I say how unbelievably gorgeous Sequoia National Park is? We went to Sequoia to see those trees that have leant their name to the Park but there are some spots of supreme beauty in that place that aren't defined by sequoia trees. Those picture-perfect meadows that I imagined at the end of the main road running down the middle of Kings Canyon? They exist. I don't know whether they exist in Kings Canyon but for sure they exist in Sequoia. They are just amazingly peaceful, bucolic canvases. And when they are flush with snowmelt, the grass is so green in the morning sun. They truly are amazing. I cannot recall being in a place much more gorgeous and I'm not being melodramatic here.

When we found out Kings Canyon was effectively shut down, we had to find an alternate Zumwalt Meadow in Sequoia National Park. We picked Crescent Meadow. It sounded like an adequate substitute. Meadow. Mountains. Trees. Remote. End of the road in a National Park. Rather than setting off first thing in the morning for Zumwalt, we'd head to Crescent Meadow. We figured we'd get there at about eight and grab one of the few spots in the parking lot near the Crescent Meadow loop trail and set off for a walk with very few other (but enough to provide a lifeline in case of an up close bear encounter) people to see if we could find a bear. And if not, it would be a good walk anyway.

The Crescent Meadow loop trail sounded perfect by the way for a morning hike. Flat, rated "easy" by the Park, 1.6 miles and a loop, which meant that we'd only get so far away (0.8 miles in fact) from the parking lot. Effectively after we got halfway through the hike, we'd be getting closer to the car with every step.

We got to the Crescent Meadow parking lot at about 8 a.m. after leaving our hotel about 2-1/2 hours before that. We got one of the last spots (so lucky), grabbed our water bottles and camera and looked for the trailhead. Crescent Meadow loop signs pointed both left and right. We picked right. It looked greener and we'd been heading in that direction already.

So we are not 10 minutes into our walk and we see a bear. We honestly thought there was no way we'd see one and less than a quarter of an hour since we left the car and started walking, we saw a young black bear foraging in the sunlight at Crescent Meadow. Are you kidding me? This was fantastic. How lucky were we? We thought the chances of seeing one of these animals was super remote and about the moment we left our vehicle we find one. So lucky! We watched him or her move across the Meadow at a leisurely pace before disappearing from our view. So good. We are strong believers in getting up early to see wildlife and it for sure paid off in 2023 in Sequoia.

Our first bear of the trip is shown in the two pictures above. He (or she) looks mostly black in color, although the sun makes the fur in the back look a little light brown. Could be the light or it could be just a patch of brown fur. Black bears are not always black. They can be all sorts of shades of brown or even blond. It was a black bear for sure because the only bears in the park are black bears so there's really no debate to be had here. 

It is so special to see wildlife in the true wild. This bear was amazing. This had to be a good omen. Plus it was small, so in the unlikely event that it had come near us and attacked us (don't laugh!), I think we could have taken him. Or her. We watched it move out of sight and decided to move on.

The Crescent Meadow loop trail runs around its namesake meadow before heading into the woods. We kept going and going until we felt pretty sure we had traversed all 1.6 miles and should be getting back to the car. Only...no car. No car park either. No nothing. End of trail. I thought this thing was supposed to be a loop? 

I don't know if we did something wrong or what. It didn't look to me like we missed any sort of turn. So we did what (I feel) anyone would do in a strange place with no cell signal: we turned around and started walking back. We thought we were done and would be on the road again. Didn't happen. Now we had about a mile and half hike back the way we came. My estimate. Could have been less but I don't feel it was.

And that's when we saw the two bears.

Bear number three, Crescent Meadow loop trail, Sequoia National Park.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time hiking in bear country. I've found myself off in the woods or on a trail a couple of times in my life in spots where bears might live or be knowing really pretty well that the chances are super remote I'd actually see a bear. But seeing two of them just a few hundred feet away moving through a meadow at some speed was a bit unnerving. I mean here we are by ourselves (where the heck were all those people who had parked in the parking lot???) in the middle of nowhere with no cell service and no bear spray and with two bears within sight. And they did not look small. I'm not sure we could have taken one of these bears, let alone two.

To make things worse, we are now moving away from the two bears back along the trail we walked to get to the dead end that was supposed to be the end of the loop. You aren't supposed to turn your back on bears and move away, right? Isn't that just like running? I have to admit I was shaking at first. It was a little difficult to focus the camera zoom on these animals when we first spotted them. This is some next level, what-the-heck-do-we-do-here type stuff. I mean, what do we actually do here? Other than move away back along the trail and hope we weren't noticed.

And yes, despite the shock of seeing two pretty good sized bears with nobody else around a nothing but nature between us and them, I still kept taking pictures. Why would I not? I have to blog about this, after all.

Still...pretty nervous on this one.

We were fine. Of course we were. Everything was absolutely fine. They either didn't see us or didn't smell us or just didn't care. And we weren't stupid enough to do something like bring a turkey sandwich or something like that on the hike with us. We walked around the trail back to the car and moved on. Nothing to see here, folks. But it got the blood flowing first thing in the morning for sure. I have never been in this situation before and I'm honestly glad we saw these three bears, including the last two. It's now a treasured experience despite the nervousness on first sight. Now I can say I've seen a bear in the wild pretty close to me with nothing between me and it. That's more than I could say in May of 2023.

Bear number two running (top) and bear number three (bottom), Crescent Meadow loop trail.

As a signature bear experience for this trip, what we saw on Crescent Meadow loop was just fine with me. Sure, a better bear encounter would have been stopping a bear charge by making myself look big and ferocious and have the bear walk away looking defeated, but I was really very much OK with this experience. Plus that other scenario has way more of a chance of going seriously wrong. Three bears in one hike? I couldn't have hoped for anything more. Really. This is as many bears as we saw in a full day in Rocky Mountain National Park in June of 2020 and one more bear than we saw in six days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks later that same year. And all this took place in the first two hours we were in the park. 

Early bird. Worm. That's all I really have to say here.

But we weren't done with the bears.

If there was a meeting with a bear that I'd hoped to have in California last month, it was exactly what we had at Big Trees trail later the same day in Sequoia. Gorgeous green meadow, lone bear moving very slowly through the grass looking for food and enough people around to feel like there was no danger whatsoever. That's exactly what happened. The Big Trees trail was one of the highlights of our trip to Sequoia because it got us a great look at a variety of good-sized giant sequoias. The bear was just a bonus.

And the enough people around to feel like there was no danger is an important factor. Not that it was really needed. Hey, I like security blankets, what can I say? Either that or all I really need to do is run faster than the slowest person, right? 

We lingered on the Big Trees trail for maybe 20 minutes watching this lone bear root around for whatever he was interested in near a smallish non-sequoia tree. There was not a whole lot of action. Not like the two bears running we saw earlier in the day. And that was fine. This was the last bear we'd see in Sequoia. Right before we saw this one, we found another jet black bear in the woods just maybe 50 yards off the Big Trees trail, but he split before we could get a picture.

Wild animals are difficult and unpredictable. You can plan and plan and plan all you want but there's no guarantee that a bear or moose or elephant or some sort of bird or any other living creature is going to cooperate and show up and stand still enough and pose so you can get some signature shot to put on your wall or add to a blog post or just throw on your hard drive and have it never see the light of day ever again. We've had some disappointing wildlife days. Sequoia National Park in 2023 was not one of those. Although it really was supposed to be Kings Canyon. Good thing it was closed. Sometimes being prepared and having backup plans gets you the result you want anyway. It sure did for us in California this year.

Two last bear pictures. Big Trees trail, Sequoia National Park.

Big Trees

In 2008, on my way from the Napa Valley to San Francisco, I stopped off for a few hours to visit Redwood National Park. My mom and dad had visited the Park a year or maybe two or three before I was in the area in '08 and my mom insisted I had to go. The trees were huge, she said. Or something like that. So I went.

I went. I saw. I walked a while. I wasn't impressed. I mean sure they appeared to be tall. But big? Ehhh...I don't know. Big is different than tall.

While I didn't know it at the time, in fact, the tallest three trees in the world are all California redwoods and they are all growing in Redwood National Park. At over 375 feet tall, they tower over the next tallest species of tree in the world (the Himalayan cypress) by a good 40 or 45 feet or so. But I swear they weren't big. It's difficult to tell how tall a tree is from the ground. I mean what's another 50 or 100 feet here and there. When you are standing next to something that high, you can't really tell the difference. Or so I'm supposing. I expected to see something that was really, really huge. I didn't get that at Redwood.

I thought about my experience at Redwood National Park for a while. Maybe years, even. And eventually I figured out the reason why I wasn't impressed with the big trees in that park was that I was expecting to find giant sequoias, not redwoods. I'd never seen a sequoia at this point in my life but that's for sure what I was thinking of. Like tunnels-through-a-single-tree big. But sequoias don't grow on the coast of California. There is no easy stop from Napa to San Fran to go see a giant sequoia. That type of experience takes a lot more work. Like headed to the Sierra Nevada Mountains type of work. Long drive. Middle of nowhere type stuff.

Turns out 2023 would be the year I'd go try and see what I thought would be a really, really huge tree.

General Sherman Tree, Sequoia National Park. I get it, without something for scale it's not big, right? Read on!

The first stop on our roundabout drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco this past June was Sequoia National Park. We didn't plan it that way. We planned to spend our first full day in California in Kings Canyon National Park immediately to the north of Sequoia. But some road closures from a massive amount of rain and snow over the winter forced us to adjust a bit and Sequoia ended up being the focus of our first day out west. To see everything we had on our list we actually had to spend part of a second day at Sequoia, but that's not really relevant to our quest to see some giant trees.

To get to Sequoia last month, we had to drive down through Kings Canyon (so technically we did enter Kings Canyon first...), which from our base in Visalia was about a two hour drive just to get to the Park entrance. As we drove, we wondered: would we really be shocked by the size of these trees? Would we even notice that they were bigger than the average redwood, which seemed to be all around us as we drove? Was this worth the shock and awe factor we expected? Or would this just be another tree disappointment just like I had in 2008?

We had some driving time to wonder all this because sequoias don't grow just anywhere. They have a very, very specific environment they thrive in and they only grow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains under the right conditions. It actually makes them relatively rare as trees go. They can't just plant their roots in any sort of soil under any sort of circumstances. And driving for 90 minutes or so on our Sequoia / Kings Canyon day didn't take us through any of those places. We'd be waiting and waiting and watching while we inched closer to the right place.

When we finally saw our first sequoia on that drive, it was not like seeing another redwood. These were some seriously massive really obviously noticeable trees we were driving past. I can hug most redwoods and have my hands touch on the back side of the trunk. There's no way that I could do that with what I saw the first time I laid eyes on a sequoia. I mean, these are some seriously massive trees. It is obvious that they are much, much thicker and more massive than most trees I have ever been near to. Maybe I've seen some baobabs with larger trunks but the height of these gargantuan-trunked trees was just astonishing. I hate to put any tree ahead of my beloved baobabs but these sequoias might just do that. Just WOW!!!

The best part was, what we saw on that drive didn't really turn out to be that big. Not compared to what we saw later.

A relatively thin sequoia. Near Tunnel Log, Sequoia National Park.

Now, to be perfectly transparent here, the California redwood and the giant sequoia are both, in fact, sequoias. The California redwood's scientific name is sequoia sempervirens and the giant sequioia's scientific name is sequoiadendron giganteum. But for the purposes of this discussion and for the rest of this post, when I write sequoia, I mean sequoiadendron giganteum. Redwood = tall and thin. Sequoia = a little less tall but really, really massive. Like super massive. Have I used massive enough in this post yet?

So about that environment. The sweet spot for a sequoia is between 5,000 and 7,500 feet above sea level. Any lower and it's too dry for the trees to live. Any higher and it's too cold for the trees to live. There are a number of spots primarily in Sequoia National Park, but also in Kings Canyon National Park, which are ideal for the growth of sequoias. The Park calls this zone the Sequoia Belt and some of these trees have been here before the arrival of white men in the forests where these behemoths grow. I know what you are probably thinking...that means that some of these trees are more than 500 years old. Yep, that's right. In fact, that's pretty young. Some of these trees are estimated to be more than 3,000 years old. Seriously. If I have my choice of what to come back to this planet as when I get reincarnated, I might just choose a sequoia.

Although hold onto that thought just a bit. There's a huge asterisk on that statement for me. We'll get there.

Felled sequoia and fire damaged bark. Sequoia National Park.

Our day in Sequoia National Park started at Crescent Meadow deep inside the Park. When we visited, it was as far into the Park as we could get. We figured why not start at the most remote spot earliest in the morning and work our way backwards, particularly with the easiest route to that spot from Visalia washed out with the winter flooding. Sure, a 5:30 a.m. departure time isn't what I want to be doing every morning, but it was our second day out west and we were still on east coast time. Let's hit the road at dawn.

There are a lot of sequoias to be found along the roadside to Crescent Meadow. There are also a good number of pretty large-ish specimens right along the path of the Crescent Meadow loop trail, which we had targeted as our first of a few hikes that day. As a first encounter type of experience, this area of the Park was a great introduction, as was seeing Tunnel Log, the downed tree which was converted in the 1930s to a tunnel which you can drive through still today and which is pretty close to Crescent Meadow. There are some lone impressive looking sequoias near Tunnel Log that are worth gazing at in awe of their mass. 

We had only just begun to scratch the surface.

We didn't go to Crescent Meadows to see sequoias. Not really. Seeing trees there was just a bonus. But we did get two of our signature looks at these giants on the way back. There is a group of trees just past Tunnel Log (just past on the way out, that is) called the Parker Group, a group of eight sequoias clustered together and named for the family of Captain James Parker, who served as superintendent of the Park in the 1890s. Because of their proximity to each other, they give a different perspective on how big these trees are. Sure it's cool to stand next to one of these trees in isolation and feel small. Try it standing among eight. You are dwarfed by the living masses all around you. It puts you in your place a bit, and that's exactly what I wanted to experience here. The first picture of this post is just that view.

The Parker Group is also an excellent spot to take some souvenir pics. Just saying...

The other wow(!) moment we had coming back from Crescent Meadows was a stop we made at a downed tree that had fallen over and and in the act of doing so had ripped its roots right out of the soil. We'd stand next to some bigger trees later in the day but we had to pull over and check out these roots. I'm guessing these things were at least 15 tall. On a small-ish sequoia, if there is such a thing. Look, I know I keep saying this and will continue to keep saying this...but the size of these trees is incredible. I should have parked the car next to it before taking the picture above.

Medium-sized sequoia with scale figure (top) and sequoia eating a rock (bottom). Sequoia National Park.

Our intentional quest to see some really, really large and enormous trees started at the Giant Forest Museum. The Giant Forest (so named by naturalist John Muir) is the largest stand of sequoias in the world with an exceptionally large number of giant trees in its midst. Maybe that is obvious from the name. If you want to see lots and lots of sequoias, head to the Giant Forest. Maybe that's obvious too. 

These trees are literally everywhere you look around the museum and along the nearby Big Trees Trail. We found the stop in the Museum to be quick and informative while also being a good departure point for our second hike of the day along Big Trees. Both are worth doing. In the Museum we learned about the sequoia's unique environment for sustained growth along with the distribution of the various groves in the Parks and the fire resistant properties of the trees' astonishing trunks. Indeed, there are many, many trees in the Parks where you can see evidence of the scars of forest fires but the sequoias are uniquely adapted to resist such events with a moisture-retaining, sponge-like bark. Hey, if you are going to live for over 3,000 years, you better have a trick or two up your sleeve.

It was also at the Giant Forest Museum that I had a damper but on my reincarnation plan. There's a wheel inside the museum that you can spin with about 50 or 60 outcomes for a sequoia seed with spaces for things like eaten by a squirrel or landed in the wrong place to take root or whatever. There's only one space where the seed actually makes it to a tree. The odds for survival of a seed are very long. It's a bit daunting, but I guess that's why trees have a lot of seeds. I'm still going with a sequoia as my reincarnation plan but I want to be one of the seeds that survives.

Standing outside the Museum is a sequoia called the Sentinel Tree. It was the first really massive tree that we would encounter in the Park. Those trees on the Crescent Meadow loop trail that seemed solid and big seemed actually quite small when compared to the Sentinel Tree. We could tell that it was important in some way because it was fenced off. It was the first tree we came across that we couldn't walk up to and touch. It wouldn't be the last.

Looking up at Sentinel Tree. Massive, right?

So I realize I'm about halfway or more through this post without really discussing how big these trees are. Maybe we should cover that before we move on.

We have spent the better part of ten years seeking out the largest living things on our planet. We've seen grizzlies and moose in Alaska, which are really some pretty big animals. We've done those two one better by spending time with bison (the largest mammal in present day North America) in Yellowstone National Park and the states of North and South Dakota. Looking abroad, we've made three trips to sub-Saharan Africa to see hippos, giraffes, rhinos and elephants, the latter of which is the largest land mammal on the planet. To top that, we've taken to the oceans to find humpback whales off the coast of Alaska and in the San Francisco Bay and beaten that by a close encounter with a blue whale, the largest mammal to ever inhabit the Earth, last September off the coast of Los Angeles. 

But none of those things is the largest living thing on our planet. And spoiler alert: the largest living thing ever is the giant sequoia. Mammals aren't even close. A medium sized one of these trees dwarfs a blue whale. They are three times or more the length of the largest blue whale and can best that cetacean's mass by a factor of six. And a blue whale outweighs and elephant by about a factor of 40. That's how big these trees are. Feeling small yet? Go stand next to one. It will alter your perspective, I swear.

Double sequoia, Big Trees Trail, Sequoia National Park.

We by no means covered all of the sequoia-related hikes that both Sequoia and Kings Canyon have to offer but the Big Trees Trail, combined with the Sentinel Tree, was a pretty perfect snapshot of what things are like in the Giant Forest. There are many, many good-sized sequoias arranged around the perimeter of a marshy meadow (where you might see bears looking for food...just saying) which is sort of a hallmark environment for at least Sequoia National Park. There are also some giants that you can walk right up to and a sequoia about halfway round the right side of the trail that appears to be growing around a giant boulder. That and Sentinel Tree, which is just a huge monster, give a pretty good picture of how big these trees can get individually and in groups.

So after Big Trees Trail, we just had two last stops: the two generals.

There is an awe factor to being around these trees and personally, I think we sequenced our way through the Parks perfectly. We started by driving past a lot of redwoods until we came to our first sequoia which was clearly just much, much more giant. We then added a walk past some good-sized specimens near Crescent Meadow and in the Parker Group before hitting a really massive tree (Sentinel Tree) and an amazing grouping of tons and tons of trees on Big Trees Trail. Our experience built. We went from big solo to bigger solo to group to gigantic solo and tons and tons of really bigs. 

The generals would take that progression to the next level. And after the generals there would be nowhere to go. We'd be at the biggest. Ever.

General Grant Tree, Kings Canyon National Park.

The General Grant Tree is the star sequoia attraction at Kings Canyon National Park. According to a sign in Sequoia National Park, it is the widest sequoia in the world at 40 feet. Now I'm not sure how they are measuring width but there is no way General Grant is 40 feet wide, unless they are measuring circumference. Look, it's really, really big. There's no question. And I believe it was way bigger than any other tree we saw except for one other in the two parks. It might be 40 feet around at its base but I'm not sure. Maybe I'm wrong. 

Now before you go thinking I've gotten overly cynical in my old age (I am, after all, 55 now...) and am just dis-believing the signs in national parks placed by our federal government employees, there were discrepancies between the signs in the two parks. But suffice it to say that this is a big tree. I mean think about a tree that is 40 feet around at its base. This is just a gigantic living thing. It is humbling to be near to something this big. It just...I mean...it's bigger than words can describe. It's what I expected to see in Redwood National Park all those years ago but also way, way bigger than I could have possibly imagined.

But it's not the biggest. The honor of the biggest sequoia (and therefore largest living thing ever anywhere) goes to the General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park.

General Sherman. Sequoia National Park.

So, yeah, I know, it's not a great picture. The tree is in shadow. But look, there's only so far away you can get from something this large and take a picture of it and that distance required to get the whole thing in just wasn't available on the sunny side of the tree. In fact, it wasn't available on the shady side of the tree either and I have to believe I got 100 or so feet away or more. It's that big. The top of the tree wouldn't fit in the picture. The size of this thing staggers the imagination.

General Sherman takes a bit of a walk to get to. It's in a fairly dense grove of sequoias down a pretty steep hill from the trailhead parking lot. That means it's easy to get down and a bit of an effort to get back up. It was actually a pretty tough hike. Definitely more physically stressful (but maybe not emotionally stressful...we'll get to that in another post) than any other hike we did in any of the three national parks we visited in California.

Our walk down was a bit of a repeat of our morning drive. Would we really think this tree was that much bigger than the others? Would we even be able to recognize it as significantly larger than other sequoias when it came into view? We thought these exact same things about sequoias vs. redwoods a few hours earlier.

Big Trees Trail, Sequoia National Park.

The answer to our question, of course, was yes. There is a viewing spot towards the bottom of the trail and the General Sherman Tree is clearly the biggest thing in the forest. It's not even close. There's no competition. I know it's supposed to work that way. I mean this is the largest living thing on the entire planet but seeing it from that viewpoint was still shocking. It's just way bigger than I could have imagined.  This tree weighs 1,385 tons. That's 2.77 MILLION pounds. That kind of size is just not even relatable. Being in this tree's presence is just so humbling. I guess we sometimes think there is no limit to what humans can do on this world of ours but we can't do what these trees do. We can't get that big and keep living for thousands of years. It's just so impressive.

I can't even imagine what this tree has seen over the centuries it has been growing. It's older than our calendar. It has scars on its trunk from fires that occurred more than 150 years ago. Just think about what the history of man was like when this thing first sprouted. It's been alive since about 200 years before the time of Christ. I mean, really?

There is a sign near the General Sherman tree that says us standing next to that tree is like a mouse looking up at a six-foot tall human. One of the reasons we travel is to get a different perspective on our world and I have to say that having a mouse's perspective on the day we were in Sequoia National Park was worth every minute and hour of all the time we spent in planes and cars to get there. This experience, and by that I mean just standing next to one (OK so maybe not just one) of these trees was just awesome. Of the three parks we visited on this trip, Sequoia was the one that blew us away and the trees were a huge (no pun intended...) part of that experience.

Redwood National Park in 2008? Yeah, this is what I expected to see. I'm glad it paid off in Sequoia. There's nowhere to go but down now.

More trunk pics: The sunny side of General Sherman (top) and the grove near the parking lot for General Grant.