sequoia national park

view from our room at lone pine

sampling the oranges in the orchard

sequoia national park

giant sequoia tree

massive pine cones

giant sequoias make the ford look tiny

general sherman tree

largest living thing on the planet

kings canyon

Tuesday 19th April 2011

Today we woke to an amazing view from the motel window with the sun shining on the beautiful snow covered mountains. We were going to head to Yosemite today but unfortunately we would have to take the long route to get there as the road travelling from east to west through Yosemite does not open for another month to six weeks. That meant the drive was going to be about 600km rather than 250. Decided to go south and cut through some back country and through some other national parks. As we drove along this one section about 2 hours into the drive we kind of thought that it was a mistake. The road was ridiculously windy and narrow but was beautiful. The speed we had to travel was the issue and at the current speed of about 20 mph it was going to take until 10pm to get there.

We did make it through the road and onto Sequoia National Park where the giant sequoia trees grow. We got to the park at 4.30pm and we asked the ranger how long it was going to take us to see the trees and get through the park and to Mariposa which is where our motel was. The answer was about 4 more hours! I must say though it was totally worth it. The giant Sequoias are just spectacular and the size of them amazing. You can see on a photo above, the road way goes through the trees literally. The temperature at this time was only about 37 degrees F which is almost 0 Celsius. We stopped off at the biggest and oldest Sequoia tree which is the largest living thing on the planet known as the General Sherman (tree). The tree is located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in the United States, east of Visalia, California. The tree is believed to be between 2,300 and 2,700 years old. Have a look at the attached link to read some more about the tree. From there we crossed the pass and onto another National Parks, Kings Park which took us out the north west side of the park and heading towards our motel.
We stopped off at KFC for dinner along the way and arrived safely at our motel at about 10pm. It was a long day in the car but the views were totally worth every minute of the drive. Tomorrow we head to Yosemite, all we hope is that the weather is OK and that there is no snow as we would require snow chains. The expected top temp for the day is only meant to be 14 degrees C.