Silent Giants: Sequoia National Forest, CA

After Santa Barbara, we had about a week to make it up to San Francisco, where we’d be celebrating Sean’s birthday. We decided to make our way North via the Sequoia National Forest, since neither of us had ever been. On our first night, we landed in a little campground called Sandy Flats.

This campground was perched right on the Kern River, and while it was blissfully free of chipmunks, we did discover one rodent friend:

This was very exciting, but not as exciting as when I thought I saw an otter swimming next to the beaver. (Turns out it was just a second, smaller beaver. My zoology game is not what it could be.)

The next day we woke up early to hike to Miracle Hot Springs, a lovely little collection of stone pools fed by a natural spring that sits right by the river. We couldn’t find the proper route on the way in, but we managed to reach it through a combination of intuition and willingness to pretty much just slide down a hill on our butts. Fortunately, the long soak must have cleared our heads a little, because we found an established path on our way out with no trouble.

After the springs, we drove to a sequoia grove called Trail of 100 Giants. The grove itself isn’t very large, but what it lacks in area it makes up for in height.

Almost all of the mature trees had long, black gashes in the center, scars from forest fires that must have happened before the younger trees sprouted. Some of them you could even climb into; I circled one of the larger sequoias at least three times looking for Sean before I finally heard his voice coming from inside.

At first glance, the trees seemed to be all more or less the same; the more you explored, however, the more their differences became apparent. Some trees were conjoined with their neighbors, trunks fused together in their soft youth. One had a great knobby plateau growing out of its base to make a perfect natural bench. Here and there you could see a fallen tree, its root system exposed, a gaping crater left where it used to grow.

Once we’d filled our eyes and exhausted our necks, we popped into the gift store, where we asked the clerk for her favorite local spots. She recommended a nearby trail that led to a waterfall, “just past the three boulders and the pile of sawdust.” Her directions proved to be accurate.

We’d now experienced both a natural bath and a natural shower — neither of which made us anything close to clean, but we’re learning that sometimes adventurers just don’t get to smell good. (You should still let us visit you and sleep on your couch, though.)

Camping life has also meant sporadic Internet access, but we’re back in wifi-land now, and will be catching up with ourselves before long. Stay tuned, good people!