Kings Canyon

The day started early, without food, in an effort to get our hire car ASAP and get on the road. Our intention was for a long drive from Sacramento to Fresno with maybe some stops of interest on the way, but we looked a bit further east into the mountains and saw Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks - it was about another 70 miles on from Fresno.

A couple of food, sweetie, toilet restroom stops and later and we made it there by 5pm. Up until now, the landscape had been totally flat... the temp outside reached 103F which only hit us a couple of times. But a climb of over 6000 feet and temp drop of 40F was a bit of a welcome change.

We followed some trails for a few miles up past the panoramic view in the main blip, which looks north into the canyon and is deeper than the Grand Canyon. A fair few trees had suffered from forest fires, some destroyed, some just charred, but surprisingly most were unaffected. Obviously with such large trees, they have big babies too and I picked up a pine cone about 18 inches long... I will see if i can get it home. We heard some tapping at one point and eventually found the woodpecker on a live pine cone in one of the extras.

We then dashed down to some bigger sequoia including General Grant, one of the world's largest trees (268 feet and 1650 years old). Ms H is standing in front of the side that had suffered a fire. Ms H is also pictured inside the Fallen Monarch, where you could walk right through the trunk. I'm glad we managed to squeeze in a visit to these special trees as another sequoia park we had planned to go to was closed.

We finally descended back into flatville and Fresno for a stopover before heading up to Yosemite tomorrow.