The Sequoias of Kings Canyon National Park

After a couple days to recover from our visit to Yosemite National Park, we were on our way to another much-anticipated stop--Kings Canyon National Park. We learned that Kings Canyon is 8,200 feet deep, making it even deeper than the Grand Canyon. The bad news is that the road that descends into that low canyon is closed during the winter season. We know it is April and technically it is spring, but the road still was blocked. So at this time of the year, we weren't able to see King's Canyon. It gives us another reason to travel this way again in the summer.

But the stars of this national park are close to the entrance--the giant sequoia trees. We were greeted by a couple of tall trees when we first got out of our car.

Most people are here to see the world's second largest living tree. We got a picture of the two of us, smiling in front of all 267 feet of the General Grant tree. This tree was declared "the nation's Christmas tree" and a national shrine. We're talking tree royalty here.

There's a path all the way around this young giant. While most of the big trees are over 2,000 years old, General Grant is estimated to be "just" 1,650 years old. The conditions and placement must have been just right for him to grow so big so fast. It's hard to get a tree that big to fit into one picture, but we are up to the challenge.

There's a path that takes visitors to the back side of this giant, to see that there has been some fire at his feet in his long life. There's a large teepee-shaped fire wound that would have killed a lesser tree.

We've seen that these sequoias seem to be invincible since they can even survive forest fires. But today we would see evidence that many do fall. Mark is standing at the root end of "The Fallen Monarch" that didn't make it.

This is the famous monarch that fell more than a century ago. There are pictures of it when it was used as a bunkhouse for the national park construction crew, and as a stable for cavalry horses.

This picture shows its smooth and roomy interior. Sequoias are slow to decay. Even though we know it died over 120 years ago, it looks the same as it did when compared with the pictures from 1900.

There were other handsome trees in the General Grant Grove. But we were a little frustrated with all the fences that keep the visitors away from the trees. So we were glad to move on to a less-used trail without barriers. Mark is standing in the little bit of new snow at the foot of this giant sequoia.

We were less than a quarter mile down this trail when we saw more and more fresh fire damage. We found that the wild fires of 2015 got this close to General Grant and the rest of his elder statesman neighbors.

Since we visited Sequoia National Park a week ago, this is our second day with these big trees. We especially like the cinnamon color of their trunks lit up in the sunlight.

We're now on our third hike of the day. But we have found our favorite trail at King's Canyon National Park. Even though the Ranger didn't give it great reviews, we are loving our time on the North Grove Loop. It's a great place to feel small while walking beside these giants.

It's hard to get the entire tree into one picture, but here we had plenty of room to do that. Just to keep the size in perspective, the tiny blue dot on the ground on the left is all 5'2" of Denisa.

We were the only ones on this trail, so we had a great time spending time with the trees. You could even find a nice soft fallen log to lay down on.

The view looking up that giant trunk is awesome. The branches are too high to provide much shade for us down on the forest floor. Considering the temperatures were in the 40's in the mountains today, we didn't need that shade anyway.

Mark took a picture of Denisa reclining under that giant tree.

It's also interesting to just see a little piece of that 2,000-year-old trunk and think of all the things it has seen. It's colored with a little green mold, a little black from fire, a little cinnamon from the bark. It makes a fun swirling of colors and textures.

One of Denisa's favorites was this old guy that was cracked. We're talking about the tree--not Mark now.

The crack runs all the way from the base to the top. We could see blue sky from bottom to top.

You could actually walk all the way through the tree from one side to the other.

It also makes for some interesting peek-a-boo pictures since you can see all the way through at the base.

Being surrounded by all these giant trees made us wonder how they got started. We could see pine cones littering the ground under all the trees. The national park brochure says that a mature tree may easily produce up to 2,000 pine cones, bearing 400,000 seeds.

For such a large tree, the cones are only about egg-size. These pine cones can hang on the trees, green and closed, for up to 20 years. Fire is the key to drying them out, causing them to open, and then drop their seeds. The seeds inside this pine cone are only about the size and weight of a single flake of oatmeal. From such a tiny seed comes the biggest living tree in the world!

We realized that we didn't even know what the sequoia foliage looks like. That patch of green is 200 feet over our heads so we couldn't see the detail. Lucky for us there were fallen pieces on the forest floor. It looks decidedly different than a pine or fir needles.

As we looked around, we wondered what a young sequoia tree looks like. Mark is standing in front of an old-timer, but right beside him is a youngster. The two trees aren't shaped anything alike. The young tree has a spindly trunk, with evergreen branches attached clear to the bottom of the tree.

We were in a snow-filled meadow of young sequoia trees and didn't even know it. These trees still have their cone-shape full silhouette. They are already good-sized trees, as you can compare their size to the little blue speck standing in the snow that is Denisa.

As they grow taller, they will start losing their bottom branches. These branches litter the forest floor. Mark is holding a fallen branch that naturally ripped off a maturing sequoia tree.

The older they get, the larger these disposable branches become. Denisa is sitting on a branch that ripped off a pretty big sequoia. This single branch is as big as a regular tree. We were glad it chose to fall before we arrived, because a branch this size falling from 100 feet overhead could certainly do some damage.

It is amazing that they morph from that conical evergreen bush to the majestic sequoia with just a few remaining branches that are so high in the air.

We really liked the North Grove Loop. It allowed us to get up close to the trees, and we took way too many pictures. Mark was like a kid in a candy store, amazed with all these giant trees.

Denisa's Garmin showed that she hiked 8.5 miles at King's Canyon, but we're pretty sure Mark got an extra mile or two. He was running up hill and down to get closer to these gentle giants.

The back side of this loop shows just how close the wild fires of 2015 got to this forest of sequoias. There are blackened dead trees as far as we could see.

We had thought that sequoias were invincible, but it is possible to burn one to death. You can barely see Denisa's silhouette at the bottom of this very tall and charred sequoia.

Here's another dead giant, laying at the foot of a charred (but living) sequoia. Here's where Mark got his extra miles, running down the hill and then climbing on the dead trunk for pictures like this. We decided that he likes big trees as much as Denisa likes little wildflowers.

The only thing worse than fire for a 2,000 year old tree, is man. In the 1800's, it was great sport to cut down these trees. We took a solemn walk through the aptly-named "Big Stump Trail."

We took turns climbing on to the huge platforms that were formed from this sequoia logging.

Actually, it wasn't exactly a fair distribution of climbing. Denisa often just stood beside a tree instead of trying to climb on top of it.

Mark could never be satisfied with a picture sitting at the base of a stump.

He insisted on finding a way to climb it (and he has some sore muscles to prove that might not be a great strategy).

The sad thing about cutting down a sequoia is that it will usually splinter when it hits the ground from that height. We saw a smaller tree that looked like it would only be good for making toothpicks after it fell to the ground.

While we were wandering through this sad old forest, Mark struck up a conversation with a young man that was hiking alone. We came to find that Tom is visiting from Israel, touring the entire United States before his travel visa expires.

He just finished his five-year Israeli military duty, and is taking this time off to travel. When we talked about our trip to Israel, we remembered watching an army initiation ceremony for a new group of soldiers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Tom explained that only a few squadrons use that location, and his was one of them. We visited Jerusalem about six years ago in the month of April. That's when he was commissioned into the army. Could it be that we saw Tom that day? We might have been in the same place at the same time in Israel, and now again in Kings Canyon. We had to celebrate this small world moment with a picture together on top of the giant Mark Twain stump. Welcome to the blog, Tom, and happy wandering!

After we finished our hiking near the visitor's center, we headed down the road that leads to King's Canyon. Even though the canyon road is closed, we could drive to Hume Lake. Our drive took us to an overlook where we could see the peaks of the craggy Sierra Nevadas that still were wearing snow.

Hume Lake is a beautiful blue pond in the mountains, with plenty of adirondack chairs to get comfortable with the view. It's a pretty place to be, but the real reason we made the drive was to try to surprise someone from Oklahoma that is working at one of the Christian camps at Hume Lake. This might be a funny coincidence, but that group is in Israel this week. It's another small world moment!

As we drove back out of the mountains, we stopped at an overlook to see the layers of hills between us and the valley below. Seeing those hazy blue layers reminds us of the views in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but we are on the wrong side of the country for that.

Now we've finished the central California national park tri-fecta. We see advertisements that encourage people to visit the 3 parks in 3 days. We're glad we had the time to spread them out over a week. That gave us some time to recover from all the wow factor before we visited the next one. We've been blessed again to wander His wonders!