On Friday morning we had a nice breakfast with Grandma Youmans and then hit the road towards the Sierras. We arrived with plenty of time to find a great campsite in the Sunset Loop at Grant Grove. Highly recommended, as the name implies, the sunsets over California's Central Valley are awesome.
Our first stop was the Grant Tree itself; the first of many Sequoia visits on this trip. Sequoias are a really stunning tree because while they're not the tallest, they're just HUGE and grow fat. Here's Shannon in front of one of the first ones we saw:
There's a short part of this hike were you walk through an old Sequoia log. Rad.
No National Park visit is complete without a Ranger Talk. This nights had a seasonal ranger impersonating John Muir. It was a pretty impressive act complete with Scottish accent (Muir was Scottish).
There is also a reasonable chance this was Santa Claus on his summer job. Here is young junior Ranger Connor getting his mind blown.
The next morning we drove the into Kings Canyon. We had heard about the wonderful alpine lakes in the high sierra and had picked one out (Eagle Lake) only to discover we were wrong about where we were on the map... by about 4 hours... so we went to a backup plan.
At first, spirits were down... we endured a hot (south-facing) climb of about 1,200 vertical feet before the overlook. Fortunately for us, the overlook was GLORIOUS. Or spirits immediatly turned as we realized how great of a spot we had found.
The hike was actually a loop and after the overlook we continued north over a ridge into one of the most fantastic sub-alpine forests I've ever hiked. This area has sparse trees that we think were from a fire (not recent?)? Anyway, I was shocked at how beautiful the big trees were surrounded by a carpet of wildflowers.
This is tree skier heaven.
After our hike, we continued up canyon to Zumwalt Meadows. The stop here had an ulterior motive. During the Ranger Talk the night before many people had said they had seen bears here. We were on a literal bear hunt. I was excited. Shannon, not so much. We didn't see any bears, but the views of the meadow were great.
We retreated to the campsite where we enjoyed some Shells-And-Cheese (we're classy like that) and a Sierra Nevada brew. A great day in a new mountain range for both of us.
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