For our last full day on our road trip, we planned to visit Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks south of Yosemite. After packing up the campervan and driving down to the Central Valley, we stopped for a late breakfast in Fresno. Whilst we were in civilisation we had a quick look at the weather forecast and quickly realised that our run of good weather was most definitely coming to an end.
We hoped that we might just have enough time to see a few of the Giant Sequoias before the worst of the bad weather started to arrive. As we drove east back into the mountains we could see a heavy layer of cloud sitting over the hills in front of us. As we climbed higher into the park the weather started to deteriorate and we made the decision to stop at the first group of trees, the General Grant Grove.
As we started to walk the loop through the grove, light flurries of snow started to fall! For the most part the snow didn’t settle, but if you looked closely at the base of some of the trees, you could see little pockets of snow.
We continued around the loop, visiting the General Grant Tree, the second-largest tree in the world. Despite the size of the General Grant Tree, it is not one of the oldest sequoias, it was just located in an area with plenty of sunlight and water which allowed it to grow quickly. The trees are actually measured by volume, counting only the trunk, not branches, leaves or roots. The General Grant Tree has a trunk volume of 46,608 cubic feet (1,320 cubic metres). Despite being so close to the giant trees, it was hard to really appreciate the size (or volume of the tree) as your sense of scale becomes distorted as you walk through the forest.
We stopped for lunch at a scenic lookout, which wasn’t especially scenic due to the low cloud. After spending some time to modify our campsite plans for the night, we decided that the sky was looking bright enough for us to do one final walk. We set out on the intriguingly named ‘Big Stump Trail’, and after a while walking through the forest we came across the Mark Twain Stump. The stump was all that remains of a Giant Sequoia that was around 16 feet (4.8 metres) in diameter. The tree was felled in 1891 by the Army so that the tree could be displayed in New York and London as people couldn’t believe that trees reached such dimensions.
After walking through a few smaller sequoia groves, we found ourselves back at the campervan and with the snow flurries starting to fall again, we made our way back into the warmth and sunshine of the Central Valley where we had found a campsite nestled among the orchards.