on the way

You know, I really thought that no road into a park could be more switchback-y than Mesa Verde, and that no view from a campsite could possibly be better than this, and that Zion is the most beautiful place on earth.

I was wrong on all three counts.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sequoia and King’s Canyon National Park. (Unfortunately, many of the photos are on their side… gallery’s rotate-photo function does not appear to be functional.)

I drove into the park from the south. (It’s worth mentioning at this point that although the two parks still retain their individual names, they are administered as one park — and no one really seems to know why they’re still called two separate names. ) There are four distinct climatic regions in the park: the foothills, which are desert-y, the sequoias, the high sierra, and the canyons. If you drive the length of the park from south to north, you get to experience all four. It’s a gorgeous drive — winding up the mountainsides, watching the flora change from yucca and other desert scrub to trees.

Then, without really any warning, the trees suddenly get rather large.

Sequoia and King’s Canyon have the largest and the third-largest living things in the world growing within their borders: General Sherman Tree and General Grant Tree. (No one knows what the second-largest is, either. I suspect I may find it in the sequoia grove at Yosemite.) Photos can’t convey the mass of these trees. They’re huge. The sign at the base of the Grant tree says that it would take twenty-two people holding hands to encircle it. That’s a big tree, yo. And it’s not even the biggest!

The drive from Grant Grove up to King’s Canyon is amazing. It parallels the King’s River a good deal of the way, meaning that I passed waterfalls and rapids and other cool stuff.

Oh, and I saw a bear. A baby bear. It was adorable. Unfortunately, my camera chose that particular moment to jam. Of course.

(No, Mom, it was not in a tree.)