Sat: Sequoia

I took many pictures this day, mainly after lunch. Again, Di Yin took many more than me. Hers include some with more color of our morning adventures. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #83 in the album). When you see a picture captioned "In the morning, we could see the sky through the car windows." (picture #218), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

We ate breakfast at our campsite: sardines, roasted crimini mushrooms, and a sandwich of roasted portobello mushrooms on whole wheat bread.

Then the adventure began. We locked our keys in the car! (technically the trunk) Di Yin said something about it being an adventure and I said, "I don't like adventures." We met a nice Nebraska couple at the campground who gave us a lift to the ranger station where we learned the rangers have equipment to unlock cars. Thank goodness--no need to call a mechanic from outside the park who would take two hours to get to us. The ranger at the station made a walkie-talkie call. We walked back to our campsite to find a different ranger waiting for us. All in all, we probably lost only 40 minutes on this mishap.

Our problem resolved, we drove up and out of Kings Canyon and down into Sequoia. Gosh Kings Canyon is gorgeous! It drizzled a little as we left. In Sequoia on the way to our destination, we saw a black bear (a young one but not a cub) cross the road. At Lodgepole Visitor Center in the center of Sequoia, we bought Crystal Cave tickets for later and stopped to have lunch. (It was a long drive.) We assembled sandwiches of canned salmon and roasted zucchini on whole wheat bread, and also more roasted mushrooms. Yes we roasted a lot of stuff the previous night.

After lunch, we stopped by the Giant Forest Museum. It's a nice little museum about the life cycle of sequoias. We spent about fifteen minutes there.

Next up we drove to Crystal Cave, or, more precisely, drove to the parking lot from which we hiked to Crystal Cave.

Crystal Cave, sadly, was not as dramatic as east coast caves. Nevertheless, it was fun to see, and we appreciated that it was nice and cool. We had a somewhat annoying tour guide.

Later, we headed to the large sequoia grove known as Giant Forest. We passed General Sherman Tree, the largest sequoia by volume, then walked Congress Trail, perhaps the most famous trail in the grove. As always, for details see the pictures. Due to the trees' soaring nature, some people say the giant forest feels like a cathedral. It took longer than I expected. Supposedly the trail is only two miles long, plus an additional half a mile each way to get to it. Yet, we spent two hours in total walking through the groves. I think we might've accidentally veered off trail at times; the signage was confusing. Looking at the map, we might've walked parts of Alta Trail and Trail of the Sequoias too.

After the hike, we started back to our campground, stopping for dinner at the restaurant in Grant Grove Village. We split the trout almondine, served with wild rice (quite good) and sauteed mixed vegetables, and a burger with fries.

I looked forward to returning to our camp to sleep on our air mattress with pillows, a perfect end to a good day. Alas, it was not to be. The first surprises heading back to the campsite, however, were good, interesting ones. On the road we passed something that looked like a black squirrel with white spots. It couldn't decide which way to flee from the middle of the road. Maybe it was blinded by my brights. We also passed a frog, ribbiting as it calmly crossed the road, and a lizard, who did an instant one-eighty when it saw us coming. Finally, we came upon a mess of broken rocks on the road. This was the first hint of badness. Nearby, two cars were pulled over. I imagined one was driving too fast, hit the rocks, and blew a tire.

As we approached the campgrounds, we saw lots of road work, many road crews and bulldozers and various stretches of roads that were reduced to one lane. These roads were fine in the morning. We saw lots of debris on the driveable part of the road.

At night, especially given the road changes, it was hard to find our campground. We couldn't easily spot landmarks or even read the signs that were occluded by the road crews.

Once at our campground, we found the road next to our parking spot covered with bark, rocks, and other debris. I decided it wasn't worth risking parking in our spot. We parked in the empty campsite immediately before ours.

While gathering flashlights to figure out what was going on, we ran into a couple at the next campsite. They explained that there was a massive rainstorm that brought down lots of stuff from the mountain. Enough stuff washed onto the road that the rangers closed the road into and out of the lower part of the canyon. Various streams and run-off pipes, unable to handle downpour, overflowed, sometimes onto campgrounds. The pipes were out, meaning no running water or flush toilets.

We soon learned that the inside of our tent was soaked. Our air mattress had a layer of water on top of it. This might be because our rain tarp wasn't firmly lashed down. The forecast listed only "a forty percent chance of showers and thunderstorms" with no mention of any sort of horrible downpour; we didn't worry about the rain. Given the storm's description and the havoc it caused, I doubt our tent would've survived intact even if it had been properly secured.

After some debate, we settled down to sleep in the car. We fell asleep while creatively debating what we were going to do the next day with our soaked camping equipment: how and where we were going to pack it, how and where we were going to dry it, and whether any of the damage will prove irreparable.