Sunday, June 3, 2012

Day 13: General Sherman's last stand (of trees)

After getting a very restful night of sleep at our motel, Geries and I headed out for Sequoia National Park to see some of the largest and oldest trees in the world. The start of the trip was a bit of a nightmare, since the air conditioning was acting up, and the temperatures grew in excess of 100 degrees. Eventually we stopped at a Walmart to get some refrigerant, and that cleared the problem up, but just a little while earlier we were literally cooking in the car.

Once back on the road we followed the highway alongside the Rocky Mountains for a ways, then took a turn that delved deep into the mountains. After navigating ever more convoluted roads we finally made it in to the park. Since we just planned to drive through on our way to Yosemite, we decided just to visit General Sherman in the Giant's Grove before making good our escape.

The roads of the park wound along the side of the mountains with nothing but incredibly stubborn trees clinging to bare rock on one side, and a precipitous drop to the other. It's an incredible sensation almost like flying being only feet from nothing but a several hundred foot drop to the valley floor below. However, it didn't take long for the view on the other side of the car to eclipse the feeling of flight, because we soon came upon the namesake trees of the park. Colossal barely begins to describe the sequoias that occasionally dotted the side of the road in sparse groves. The car could easily have driven through the base of their trunks, and their gnarled branches dwarfed even the normal sized trees that surrounded the giants.

Almost an hour into our drive through the surprisingly expansive park, we came to the Giant's Grove, where General Sherman, the largest tree in the world, resides. Although a few trees in the world may be wider or taller, General Sherman is the most massive, holding the largest volume of wood of any other, and still growing. To stand next to the tree is to feel like an ant only barely able to see its skyward extent. As if the incredible size of the trees wasn't enough, even more awe-inspiring is their age. General Sherman is 2,200 years old, and not even the oldest of the sequoias. To be around a living thing that has lived longer than a large portion of civilized humanity is humbling to say the least.

We wandered through the garden of impossible trees for a little while before heading back to the car to make our way to Yosemite. Before we made it too far out of the park, however, we stumbled upon a grizzly bear crossing the road. We stopped to check it out (from the safety of the running car) as it went about its business without offering us a second glance. By then the sun had nearly set, and we were unfortunately faced with another night drive.

In general I hate night driving because it offers little in the way of views, and especially if I'm traveling through a place I've never seen I inevitably feel as if I've missed something noteworthy. Nonetheless we left the dark forest behind us to dip out of the mountains for a spell before winding our way back up into them as we neared Yosemite.

Not having learned our lesson from the camping situation in the Grand Canyon, we neglected to solidify our campsite before embarking. To our credit, though, all of the reserved sites were filled before we checked them, and the documentation we found was vague on the status of first-come first-served camping. Regardless of who was at fault, we ended up driving around Yosemite, this time knowing we were missing out on spectacular views since the moon was bright enough to unsatisfactorily sample them for us. A few hours, and dozens of miles later, we found a parking spot in an inconspicuous location and-- you guessed it!-- slept in the car. 

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