Thursday, May 23
[Also retyped up as best as possible from a post written up at the time that got deleted.]
After getting all packed up, I drove next door to the Grant Grove area, where General Grant, the second largest sequoia lives. They had a nice short trail with signs talking about sequoias. General Grant is a very large tree. It is thought to be over 1600 years old. It is 107 feet in circumference at the base, which is very large, though it also has a lot of ins and outs. It isn’t a nice round tree that you can loop a string around to measure. It has fire scars visible on the outside and likely many underneath what you can see based on the shape of the base. It is listed as 267 feet tall and is considered a Monarch, which basically is just a name for an elder sequoia.
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| This fallen sequoia was used as both a shelter and a classroom in the early days of the park. |
So time for your brief study of sequoias. They are the largest trees on earth. Not the tallest, but the largest by volume. Redwoods tend to be taller, but also have a smaller diameter. They live for thousands of years. It is very likely that a number of the sequoias found at SEKI have been around since we roughly moved into the Common Era. A sequoia is considered a juvenile tree during its first 100 years or so. During this stage it looks more like your standard large Christmas tree, but as it gets older it will lose its lower branches. This often happens due to storms and fire and is considered normal and expected. It then moves into its adult life, eventually hopefully reaching life as a “monarch” when its shape tends to round up a bit. Sequoias are designed to live in an environment with fire. Its bark is very thick. It is not a sappy tree because sap burns. And its insides are very fire-resistant as well. And then of course, it is well known that sequoias require fire for its pine cones to open, allowing saplings to eventually take root and start life. In the old days, fires would come through every 10-15 years and burn up the undergrowth, leaving gaps in the canopy for the baby sequoias to get sunlight. However, in the past 100 or so years, humans have determined that fires are not good and tried to stop all fires in the National Parks and forests. This has led to crowded undergrowth that burns hotter, which leads to fires that are able to penetrate the bark of the sequoias. The National Parks are trying to do more “natural” prescribed burns, but they have so much area that needs to burn that it is going to take a long time to reach that point. Their trunks tend to start out more of a grey-brown color, but turn more cinnamon colored as they grow. Info dump over! At least for now.
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| General Grant Tree's fire scar. |
From Grant Grove I headed south down the Generals Highway. I stopped at Big Stump trailhead to hike out to Big Stump. This is another one of those sad points. Sometime roughly 100 years ago there was a huge sequoia in the forest that was called the Mark Twain Tree (they liked to name large sequoias after influential people). People out on the east coast did not believe that there were these huge trees out on the west coast, so the Mark Twain tree was cut down so a portion of the tree’s trunk could be sent to the east coast so people could see there were big trees out there!!! On the trail to Big Stump (as the Mark Twain Tree is now known), I saw what I think was a baby sequoia maybe 8 feet tall. I marked its GPS location and hope to maybe return in 20 years to find a larger sequoia there.
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| Big Stump |
After Big Stump I continued to the south, stopping at some overlooks along the way. After stopping at an overlook of Kings Canyon, I saw a trailhead across the road. It was the trailhead to Buena Vista Point, a short 1 mile trail. I set out on the trail, eventually ending up at Buena Vista Point, which was a large outcropping of rocks. Unfortunately the view from up there was more Mal Vista, because a large portion of the area you were looking out onto had recently been devastated by fire and was dead. On my way back down I totally lost the trail somewhere. Like I was there and then suddenly I was like, I don’t think I’m on the trail anymore. I was never truly lost as I could see the road below, but I was trying to get back to the trail using my GPS. I managed to get back on the trail…about 50 yards from the trailhead.
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| View from Buena Vista Point |
Plans to stop and hike at the Muir Grove of sequoias were quashed due to the site being closed after the large fires burned through there in 2021, so I continued on. As I was driving through the Park between the Grant Grove and Lodgepole, there were areas where it was just really sad because you would just see the corpses of all these trees; just tall, dead logs where just 5 years ago was a beautiful forest.
As I was driving through this area, I decided my next stop was going to be Lodgepole Visitor Center and Village, where I could eat lunch (my delicious peanut butter and tortilla sandwiches) and then hike to Tokopah Falls. On the hike to Tokopah Falls I decided I wanted to see what sort of shape I was in so I sort of speed-hiked to the falls. It was roughly 2 miles to the falls with a rise of 640 feet. I completed the hike to the falls in about 45 minutes which was extremely fast for a hike; especially one taking place at 7000 feet with a decent incline. I was feeling good. I sat at the falls for a while, enjoying nature. I watched a squirrel for a bit and took way more pictures than most normal people probably would. And I briefly saw a marmot before it said, “this is too many people.” On the way back down, I took my time and took a lot of pictures. I was in my Ansel Adams phase and took a bunch of black and white photos, which I haven’t looked at yet. It was as I was hiking this trail to Tokopah Falls and back that I really noticed the pine smell I was immersed in. It smelled so good!
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| Tokopah Falls |
I decided from Lodgepole to head down to Potwisha, my campground for the night, after that so I could set up camp and relax. The campground was down at 2100 ASL and I was up at around 7000, which meant a long, twisty, turny road down with lots of curves at 10 mph. It was also quite a bit warmer down there. I was afraid it might be hot, but as the sun went down, it cooled down. I did sleep without a sweatshirt on though, so it was definitely warmer.
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| Me and General Sherman |
On the way back from General Sherman, I took the round-about way to get back. I wasn’t tired yet and felt I could get some more miles in through the forest so I took a bunch of loops on the way back. I passed a tree known as “Room Tree”. The base of this sequoia was hollowed out (it was still fully alive) and it was so large in there that you could probably have put a twin bed, a side table, and perhaps a small dresser in there.
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| A group of sequoias known by the name of The House on the Congress Trail. There is another grouping called The Senate. Likely at some point a long time ago, a fire swept through and a nearby sequoia dropped a bunch of seeds in this space, where they all grew up. |
Also on the trip back, I just barely missed seeing a mama bear and her cub. I saw a family on the trail ahead of me, and the father put his finger to his mouth telling me to be quiet. When I got closer he said there had been 2 bears across the meadow from where we were. He said they had just wandered into the tree on the other side of the meadow. I wanted to see bears so I sat down for the next 15-20 minutes in hopes that they would come back, but they never did so I continued on.
I followed the trail to the Round Meadow where they have the paved Big Trees Trail. Once upon a time this area was a road to drive, with cabins around the meadow. But over time the Park came to realize they were damaging the sequoias, and the sequoias were putting the cabins and people at risk if they fell, so starting in the 70s they started removing structures and by 1999 all that was left in the area was the Giant Forest Museum and smaller bathroom structures. After finishing a hike that totaled 9.60 miles, I headed back to Potwisha for my last night in SEKI.
The next morning, I woke up and headed to Moro Rock. Moro Rock is a large rock that overlooks Sequoia National Park. I decided not to hike up there from the Museum, but instead took the road to the base of the rock, and then hike the rock itself which is not an easy hike. You basically climb 200 feet up some stairs from the parking lot to the top of the rock in like a quarter mile. But the view from up top is spectacular. If you look one direction you can see the tops of the sequoias in the Giant Forest. Looking the other direction, you can see the foothills of the park which are very different.
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| View from the top of Moro Rock |
After quick stops at Tunnel Log and Auto Log, I made my way back through the park and headed back towards San Jose for the drive back to my friends’ house. I had a great trip and definitely hope to make my way back to these two parks someday! In total I hiked 52 miles over 7 days.
