Trees, Bears and Rocks: Two Days in Sequoia

June, 2007. My youngest daughter and I are headed to the Sierras for five days, flying into Las Vegas and immediately bolting for Barstow, despite our late night arrival. It’s the last of a series of trips with each of my kids, which, when this most recent adventure is concluded, has resulted in meeting Yo-Yo Ma, seeing Ringo live, and fulfilling this child’s dream of seeing sequoias up close and personal.

As we planned the trip, I pointed out that an awful lot of beautiful places lay within several hours of each other. Sequoia National Park was our main objective (and next door neighbor Kings Canyon was a given), but if we were willing to put on some miles, we could pull Yosemite and Death Valley onto the itinerary, too. That proved too tempting to ignore for the owner of several dozen Junior Ranger badges, and I mapped out a plan that took us from McCarran International on Thursday night, on a huge, northwest loop around the Sierras, returning to Vegas for a Monday afternoon flight home. The rest of the trip, and the bulk of the driving, are in the next journal, California Bold Rush.

Bold rush, indeed. Immediately leaving the glitz of Vegas, we drove for three hours on the main route to LA, arriving in Barstow after midnight, feeling like we’d been on a desert-bound turnpike for the entire trip. As we crossed the hills and ridges, the line of receding red taillights and onrushing white headlights made an impressive pair of streaks, bound on either side by empty, empty desert. We were in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve, one NPS location we simply had to pass by (or through).

We decided not to backtrack on our trip: we would spend the night, explore all day, and push on. That would give us plenty of time to talk and reflect in car, and that plan worked perfectly.

We spent four nights traveling, the first a seven-hour layover at a standard issue but comfortable Holiday Inn Express in Barstow, and the next at Wuksachi Lodge in Sequoia. Wuksachi was OK but overpriced, leaving us thinking that camping in the Sierras would have been a great alternative (and would have saved Dad some serious money).

We saw a lot of beautiful places on this trip, and didn't feel too rushed in doing so. Sequoia was our first stop, and although it draws a lot of people, it had a much different feel than Yosemite: you feel like you’re among friends, rather than fighting for a seat on the subway. The trees are awe inspiring, and I was more than a little sorry to leave, especially since they gave rise to this trip in the first place. Bears are everywhere here: we encountered five in half a day. So take the warnings and advice seriously.

We approached Sequoia from the south, from Visalia through Three Rivers. You're still in the foothills when you hit the park's southern boundary, with a lot of climbing to do on the outdated Generals Highway. It was under repair when we were there, but even if that's complete by now, staying outside the park isn't much of an option. It simply takes too long to reach Giant Forest, Crescent Meadow, and the other places in the center of the park. So prepare to pay well over $200 at Wuksachi in high season, or pack a tent.

I'd come back here in a minute. In addition to the stately trees, the combination of the mountains, the beautiful meadows, the alpine views from Moro Rock, and the bears made this a memorable experience. It was hard to leave on the second day, but we knew we had other great things ahead of us.

We stopped for supplies at Walgreens in Visalia, having crossed desert and hills and valley on our way from Barstow to Boron to Bakersfield. We’d both gotten a thrill when Highway 198 forked northeast 10 miles later, and the large, brown sign announced that Sequoia National Park was to the right. Almost immediately, the road began to climb, soon leveling out as we looped around pretty Lake Kaweah, and then continued into the foothills of the Sierras. Around 11:30, we pulled into Three Rivers, a town that lies along the narrow spaces of the Kaweah Valley and the highway shoulder. We bought box lunches at Anne Lang’s Emporium, a cozy combination deli, coffeehouse, florist and above average gift shop, whose back porch looks down on the Kaweah. It was full of both locals and tourists, and the staff were particularly friendly. We both ordered chicken salad sandwiches, which came with a nice touch of complimentary carrot sticks and pickles. It was tempting to have lunch right there, but we had them wrapped to go, since we knew that periodic closures for construction on Generals Highway made it important to get to the park.

With our chicken salad in hand, we covered the last 10 miles to the park pretty quickly. After obligatory pictures with the sign at the park boundary, we soon arrived at the Foothills Visitor Center. We picked up maps, trail guides, and of course, a junior ranger guide, as well as a recommendation for a picnic spot.

The road moved out of the foothills and climbed a little more steeply as we approached Hospital Rock. The day was brilliant with sunshine, and we felt cool mountain air as we unpacked our sandwiches. We took a little time to explore the Rock itself, which is covered with pictographs from an ancient people, and then scrambled down to the river, where the rocks are dotted with depressions made by native peoples for grinding the acorns that were the major staple of their diet.

All of a sudden, we had time trouble. The Generals Highway (so named because it joins, among other things, the General Sherman tree in Sequoia and the General Grant tree in the adjacent section of Kings Canyon) has nearly worn out from use. Built 70 years ago, it was a cowpath that was turned into a roadbed, without any idea of the heavy use it would see from large modern vehicles. It's the only route into and through Sequoia, so NPS was staggering traffic, allowing vehicles through on the hour and then closing the road.

We’d cut it a little too close, and we charged back to the car and began tearing up the hillside (which means 35 or 40 MPH on these mountain roads). Eventually, I began counting on the fact that we’d passed the last of the southbound traffic, and plotted a softer route across the middle of the S-curves. While writing this review, my daughter confessed that her chicken salad sandwich wasn’t sitting too well on those curves but kept quiet knowing, we had to make this passage or wait another 90 minutes to reach the big trees.

Just before we reached the highway worker with the stop sign, we made contact with the back of the auto pack heading through the construction zone. As we looked in the rear view mirror, he stepped into the road with his tall stop sign, and we headed onto Moro Rock.

On a map, it looks like the stretch of Generals Highway between Hospital Rock and Giant Forest just goes crazy. Even on the low-resolution NPS park map, you can count at least 15 switchbacks, which the road needs as it ascends about ¾ of a mile between these spots that lie only 2 miles apart.

At nearly every other turn, we saw the big granite dome of Moro Rock, our next destination, jutting above the forest. We continued up the highway, the last car in the 1pm caravan heading into the center of the park. Suddenly, we reached the beginning of the sequoia habitat, and passed between the Four Guardsmen trees that serve as the boundary to the Giant Forest. These are only modest-sized examples, but you can’t take in any mature sequoia from a car, so we pulled over briefly to get a better look at our first magnificent tree.

The turn-off to Moro Rock (as well as Crescent Meadow) comes just before you reach the heart of Giant Forest. You’re now under the canopy of the sequoias, and the air was cool and fragrant. The parking lot at Moro was small (perhaps 25 spots), and we had to drive around a few times in order to find a legal spot (a challenge others simply ignored and got away with, since there were no NPS personnel here). If you're not driving through, taking the park shuttle here makes a lot of sense.

Moro Rock looks like a small version of Half Dome, its famous cousin in Yosemite Valley. Unlike Half Dome, however, Moro can easily be ascended without investing a day or challenging your mountaineering abilities. It’s a short walk through the woods to reach the beginning of the climb, which is entirely on a staircase that was blasted out of the granite (with a small part of concrete poured into the granite) in the 1930’s as one of many Civilian Conservation Corps projects. On the way up, you might stop to pity those path builders, who must have hauled every bit of materials up this path.

It’s a steep path and a non-trivial climb, but the view is worth it. At some point, I quit counting the steps, but it was somewhere near 400. There was traffic up and down the narrow set of stairs, and it takes care whenever you pass those headed the opposite direction. There are several places to stop and look out over the surroundings, but the best view is definitely at the top.

There’s a modest flat area atop the dome, with only minimal railings. The view to the north looks out over the Kaweah Valley and the Great Western Divide. It’s a beautiful view, and a nice reward as you recover from oxygen debt. To our right, we looked back over the parts of Sequoia we’d already covered, and off in the general direction of Mineral King, the most recent addition to the park that was Walt Disney’s target for a ski resort. From the top, and from a fairly large observation patio half way down, we laughed as we looked over the crazy quilt path we’d followed in racing up Generals Highway to get here.

The elevation of Moro Rock is 6700 feet, and it’s the highest spot for some distance around. Not surprisingly, you’re warned to get off the trail in thunderstorms. If you need any evidence to help you make sense of that, there’s one former tree just off the trail on the north side whose remains are completely blackened from tip to trunk. Our day carried little risk of a thunderstorm, and after enjoying the view for 20 or 30 minutes, we headed for the car and our first stop among the sequoias.

After descending from Moro Rock, we explored the southern end of Giant Forest. The Moro Rock-Crescent Meadow road runs east about 3 miles from here, a narrow, tight road that can’t accommodate RVs. The Auto Log, a famous relic from Sequoia’s past, can’t accommodate RVs or cars anymore, but you can climb on top of it. You’ll see pictures around the park of Model T's parked atop this fallen sequoia. I’m not sure when it was closed to cars, but I think I saw a picture somewhere of an early minivan that drove up the ramp.

A little further along is the Parker Group, an impressive, tightly clustered set of sequoias that lies right along the road. A little further along, we drove through the Tunnel Log, which fell across the road in 1937. It’s not the Tunnel Tree (a question the rangers must get a lot), which stood in the Mariposa Grove at Yosemite for years (and allowed cars to drive through a living sequoia). As we hiked in the area, I found a granite stone with marker barely visible about two yards off the trail. It proved to be a memorial to Stephen Mather, the early NPS director who built the system into a national jewel in its early years.

We had two main goals here: seeing Crescent Meadow, described by John Muir as ‘the Gem of the Sierras’, and hiking out along Log Meadow to Tharp’s Log, a hollowed out fallen sequoia that served as home for a cattleman who drove his herd to these meadows.

Pretty shortly, we came to the southern edge of Crescent Meadow. It is pretty, with beautiful open areas of green ringed by the large sequoias and some smaller, ordinary trees. You’re not allowed to walk into the meadow and damage the ground and the plants, but you can walk the trail around its edge and appreciate it. It was gorgeous under the clear blue skies.

These high meadows are slight depressions in the underlying bedrock, which collect rainwater from the surrounding area. You might think that such a rich source of moisture would be prime territory for sequoias, but the meadows actually hold too much water for the big trees. They do ring the meadows, though: sequoias prefer to grow on slopes, with plenty of water passing through, but not collecting.

There are several other meadows scattered throughout the Giant Forest areas, and the trails cut back and forth between them. We had a bit of a challenge finding the cutoff over to adjacent Log Meadow, and were finally walking up its west side towards Tharp’s Log when we encountered an agitated couple that clearly had something to tell us. In urgent but quiet voices (and a lot of pointing), they said "There’s a bear down there! In the middle of the meadow! He’s not moving or anything, and he’s not a problem, but we thought you should know!"

We agreed. They told us a little more about what he was up to (eating or lying down) and where he was (150 yards away in the middle of the meadow). We’d been walking a little quickly, but slowed our pace and kept our eyes glued off to the right as we moved up the trail.

All of a sudden my daughter grabbed my arm and pointed. "There!" she shouted/whispered. I was looking out to the center of the meadow, but that wasn’t where she was pointing. "Right by the trail!" she insisted. 60 yards straight ahead of us was the bear, pulling plants that grew on and around a decaying tree and contentedly munching. He wasn’t paying any attention to us, but we looked at him as long as we could stand it and then abandoned our hike around the meadow, stopping only to perform the public service of warning the next couple headed up the trail.

We returned to our car on in the lot just west of Crescent Meadow, after pausing one more time to look out over the Gem of the Sierras. As we left, we noticed a group of about 30 people just across the road, with a few cars parked on the shoulder, all looking in the direction we were heading. My daughter hopped out to ask what was attracting all the attention, and came back with the news that it was a bear.

Not just a bear: a mother and cubs, just a little more distant than the bear in Log Meadow. The longer we watched, the more we saw. There was a mom and one, two and then three cubs. We’d seen a ranger’s pickup down the road a bit, and we gradually picked up the presence of at least three NPS personnel slowly moving in from different directions, communicating by whispering into walkie talkies.

The mother realized that something was up, and stared shooing the cubs up the trees. Two of them climbed on tree on the right just as we saw a ranger on that side raise a rifle. There was a sharp crack, and the mother stood up, and then started to run directly away from us, collapsing from as she tried to scale the trunk of a fallen sequoia.

Bears in this region, as we were rapidly learning, are a constant presence. They become inured to human presence, seek food in trash cans, cars, lockers, and anywhere their keen noses can detect it. Rangers have tried a variety of ways of coping: they constantly educate visitors about bear safety, in every publication, every sign, and every interaction. Bear lockers line the edge of every parking lot at Seqouia, along with reminders never to leave food in your car. Plenty of photos show you the risk of doing so.

At Lodgepole the next day, my daughter turned in her junior ranger pamphlet and received her badge from a very friendly ranger who spent about half an hour with us. We wanted to know what was likely to become of the bear we’d seen tranquilized the previous day (and were hoping for some assurance that it was a tranquilizer gun that we’d heard). The ranger explained that they had support for a new program to tag mother bears with GPS devices, and track them to see what they were teaching their cubs about food. We’d guessed that maybe they were relocating this bear into the wilderness, but she told us that such approaches had been shown not to work with bears that learned to eat human food. If the bears completely turn to foraging in cars and trash, they have to be destroyed: there’s no rehabilitation in the wild.

Meanwhile, we hopped back in our Dodge Caliber and headed for the heart of the Giant Forest, excited to have seen four bears already, and just a little more anxious about the trails to come.

This is the heart of Sequoia: perhaps the largest sequoia grove in the world. These awe-inspiring giants are everywhere you look, stretching so far up, and blocking so much sunlight from the forest floor, that no other trees or underbrush grow in their midst. It’s an over-used description, but there is indeed a cathedral-like feel to the large open spaces that literally stretch out for a few miles here in Giant Forest.

For years, this area was the epicenter of human activity in the park. The road levels out here after a mile’s climb in altitude from Three Rivers, and the surrounding land provides just the right altitude and just the right slope to give the sequoias their optimal temperature and water supply. Ranger stations, hotels, gas stations, cabins, souvenir shops, and park infrastructure were all scattered along the roadway—and atop the relatively shallow, sensitive root structure of the trees. As early as the 1950’s, studies began to document the impact of the 400 buildings and corresponding human activity on the grove’s original residents, and the Park Service decided to nearly all functions away (including relocating lodging to the new Wuksachi Lodge). The Giant Forest Museum stayed behind, which gives a good introduction to these giant trees, the biological niche they inherit, and their sensitivity to environmental changes.

Right outside the Museum stands the Sentinel Tree, towering over the Museum and surroundings. Mature sequoias can reach almost as tall as a 30-story building, and the annual growth of giants like General Sherman is enough to make a separate 50-foot tree of a more ordinary species. The base and height of the Sentinel are marked out in tile on the plaza in front of the Museum, and we watched a young girl skipping the length of this model. Despite its size, the Sentinel doesn’t even rank among the largest trees in the park.

To see those giants, just wander a little ways into Giant Forest. A little time among these trees can completely alter your sense of perspective. Their large trunks and high foliage become your visual expectation, and ordinary things suddenly seem out of place. My daughter and I laughed as we came back to the Museum after hiking one of the trails: the little log building looked like a dollhouse situated among the trunks of a patch of rather ordinary but enormous Sequoias. Surprisingly, these giants grow from tiny, tiny seeds: a peanut butter jar in the museum holds 10,000 of the flake-like seeds, which are easily carried by the wind.

Trails riddle this area, and the constant criss-crossing makes it a necessity to pick up one of the trail guides for the area. (The modest looking brochures from the Sequoia Natural History Association are worth the few dollars; they open to a 17"x22" map on one side, with elevation lines also indicated, and thorough trail descriptions on the reverse. Spend the $25 and join SNHA; you'll do some good and get 20% off on the maps.) Even with one, we found ourselves on a path we hadn’t intended to follow. On our first afternoon here, we toured the Museum, watched a little girl dance up and down the length of the full-scale tile replica of the Sentinel laid into the plaza out front.

We headed north and across the road to the Big Trees Trail, which circles the edge of a meadow for about a mile. The trail guide claims that 'no other short trail features so many large trees, and lush, green Round Meadow provides impressive vistas of the sequoias that are hard to find on most other trails.' We didn't get to find out. We weren’t even a quarter of the way around when hikers approaching us brought news of yet another bear across the meadows, on the trail itself. Looking across, we saw him lumbering through the trees away from us. We (I?) watched long enough to be assured that he wasn’t headed in our direction, and headed back to the car to begin searching out dinner.

The next morning we returned to Giant Forest to hike through the heart of the grove. We stopped at the parking lot for the General Sherman tree, and descended down the quarter-mile path by ourselves. The world’s largest living thing is indeed an awesome sight, with its trunk about the size of a three-car garage. I think the bark of the sequoias is beautiful, with its rough, red color and deep furrows. Their foliage hardly seems enough to keep these giants alive. I truly mean no disrespect, but the way the leaves are all concentrated near the top gives the sequoias an appearance somewhat like that of a huge stalk of broccoli.

Wisely enough, the park service has finally fenced off General Sherman from its admirers. It’s awfully hard to get a good picture of a sequoia with anything but a wide, wide-angle lens, but we spent some time trying. This is the largest living thing in the world, a title some want to strip from the General and give to a large, underground network of fungus. That just seems wrong. What majesty is there in fungus?

The Sherman tree is so large that it's hard to get a handle on its size. In order to prevent vandalism (I'm guessing) the base of the tree is now cordorned off from visitors by a split rail fence that looks like it was made from a fallen cousin of the General. He's neither the tallest nor the oldest, but evidently started life in a prime location, with food and moisture in ample supply for a few millenia. Despite the damage sustained at the top (a large branch lies on the walkway that circles this behemoth), the tree continues to grow, adding enough new wood each year to make several fair-sized separate, full-grown pedestrian trees.

From the Sherman Tree, we headed off on the two-mile Congress Trail, a narrow loop that wanders through a good part of the rest of the grove. You get an idea of the lifespan of a sequoia as you walk this trail, which has a little bit of elevation change as you climb up and over some modest ridges. In addition to the mature trees, which approach a few thousand years in age, there are ‘youngsters’ and also a few fallen soldiers. Surprisingly, the sequoias have a very shallow root system, which makes them vulnerable to high winds as they age. Having one of these topple must be a frightening experience. Some scientists don’t think we have a good estimate of the maximum lifespan of a sequoia, since they usually have their lives cut short by toppling or by fire.

We spent two hours walking these paths, past trees whose names are clearly from another era. Can you imagine anyone naming things for our government institutions now, or a sitting president? But in Sequoia, you’ll walk past the Congress Tree, Lincoln and McKinley Tree, the House and Senate Tree, etc.

It’s sobering to think that even these trees were not immune to logging that scarred forests across the country. Not far away are groves that were completely logged, even after it was learned that the brittle wood of the Sequoias was rarely good for anything larger than matchsticks. Fire, gravity and man are the only real threats these magnificent trees face. In Sequoia and Kings Canyon, some 30 of the world’s 80 remaining groves are thankfully protected from the largest threat.

Lodging options in Sequoia and the surrounding area are really limited. As we passed Bakersfield, turned north and east and headed up into the foothills of the Sierra, it didn’t take long for the trappings of civilization to fall away. The town of Three Rivers reminded me of a smaller, quainter version of Springdale, UT, the village outside Zion NP. There were fewer buildings, fewer people, and more of a sense of distance from civilization.

Driving in these mountains takes time. We nearly learned that the hard way, rushing to get up the central park road near 1 pm before it switched to one-way the wrong way (for us) to accommodate much needed repairs on these old, old roads. It made me glad we weren’t planning on retreating to Three Rivers for lodging, which would add at least three hours of driving.

Instead, we paid the price to stay at the recently built Wuksachi Lodge, finished in 1999 after the Giant Forest complex was razed. It seems right to have moved a frenetic level of human activity out of the principal habitat of these magnificent trees, some 2500 years and older, which were increasingly endangered by the level of construction and traffic among and over their roots.

Wuksachi sits at the northern end of the park, between Lodgepole and the park’s northwestern boundary. It’s not centrally located, but that was part of the cost for preserving the Giant Forest, which is roughly 20 minutes away. The elevation is higher here at Wuksachi, perhaps enough that it's outside the sequoias niche. Certainly, there's no groves of those giants around the lodge and its buildings.

The newish complex consists of a central building with check-in and the lodge’s restaurant, and all 102 rooms are in three separate and apparently identical buildings to the north and east, a few minutes stroll away.

Rooms come in standard, deluxe, and superior versions. We had a deluxe room, accented with mission-style furnishings, containing two queen beds and a little nook with a table and chairs. Wuksachi bills itself as a three-diamond lodging, and that was accurate. It's just a bit above unexceptional. Our room was comfortable, spacious, and just a touch out of the ordinary—but largely a nice hotel located in the wilderness, and not a place taking full advantage of its setting. The bathroom was a little larger than normal—and without the heat lamp on, the darkest I've ever been in. Even with the location factored in, I didn't feel that we got our full money’s worth for the $210 we paid. But while picking a place to stay, I finally made the choice to give my daughter a night in the park, at least close to the sequoias she’d been dreaming of seeing. It’s dark and it’s quiet: especially when the power goes out in the middle of the night, which left me strangely disoriented, searching for the unlit clock radio, noting that no light was coming in under the door, and sleepily collecting several other observations that remained unconnected until I woke at a more normal hour and found the clock face flashing.

Standard rooms omit the nook and table; superior rooms include a sofa bed so that they can sleep six (and some trade the two queens for a king). We had two meals at the restaurant, whose pricing structure generally follows the lodging: it’s pricy, but the food is good. I’m not a big fan of laying out $15 for breakfast for two, but my daughter really wanted waffles, and so I splurged for the full buffet for her (while I went with the continental option, which was more than adequate). Dinner the night before was very nice, but there’s no option here besides a pretty high-end meal here in the lodge’s sole dining room. The rainbow trout was good, but I would just as happily saved $30 and had a burger. The closest option for that is the snack bar at Lodgepole, which requires two or three miles of driving back towards the center of the park. There's a market and deli, too.

Your best option here is probably camping. Montecito-Sequoia lodge is outside the park, further down the highway as winds up towards Kings Canyon. If you stay here, you’ll spend a chunk of time driving back into Sequoia if you still have sights to see and things to do.

One of the things I love about traveling with my kids, but especially my youngest, is that they’re nearly always up for another adventure. Even as the others were wearing down on our trip to Yellowstone a few years ago, this one would always hop out for each jaunt to a waterfall or overlook.

So when I told her the story of the Chicago Tree, the monster Sequoia that was cut for the Columbian Exposition in 1893, I knew she’d be interested in seeing the stump from this famous specimen. The Sequoias had only been discovered in the 1850’s and their enormous size made them a curiosity even four decades later. In 1890, both General Grant and Sequoia National Parks had been established, but the Converse Basin Grove lay to the north, outside of both areas. Once the second largest grove, it was being systematically logged, even though sequoia wood had already proven to be of dubious value. The General Noble Tree was selected for inclusion in California’s exhibit at the Exposition, felled, then carefully disassembled in sections, and shipped by train to Chicago to be put back together. The tree was so large that many easterners refused to believe it was real, and dubbed it a hoax. At least a section of the trunk was later displayed on the Mall beside the Agriculture Building in Washington, DC, and then shuffled off to a farm in Virginia, where it was ‘lost’.

Who could resist a story like that? Although this area wasn’t protected in 1893, it’s now part of Sequoia National Forest. As we retraced our steps from Kings Canyon, we turned off Highway 180 at Cherry Gap, using only the park map as a guide. This was our first mistake. It looked so simple on the park map… a black spur off the red line of Highway 180, with a loop that circled around the Chicago Stump. It looked like about a mile and half to the neighborhood of the stump, and then a few hundred yards to the former tree itself.

The first part of the road was flat, and through a relatively open area. We passed two campsites just off the edge of the road, where folks were probably getting ready for dinner. Just out of curiosity, I checked to see if there was cell phone coverage, since we descended off a small ridge as we left the highway. Of course, the answer was no.

National Forest, leaving civilization, no cell phone service… this immediately reminded me of the story of the CNET executive and his family who gotten snowbound in an Oregon National Forest, leading to his death by exposure as left his family and tried to find help. Why I chose to share this story with my daughter, I’ll never know. I guess I was confident that nothing similar could happen to us.

As we traveled further into the forest, the road became more of a two-track, but very passable. Shortly, we reached the intersection we’d anticipated, and turned off to the left. Nearly immediately, the two-track became much rougher, with a lot of channels cut into the road by the runoff from heavy rains. The path quickly descended about 20 feet of very rough road, deeply cut by channels of water. We leveled out at the bottom, in front of the trailhead for the Stump, and got out of the car.

To my surprise, there was a wilderness sign-in book, despite the fact that the stump was no more than a half-mile away. Given the half-dozen bears we’d already encountered in Sequoia, the possibilities of another meeting were on both of our minds.

It was about 500 yards to the stump, which was an impressive sight. It has perimeter of 70 feet, and the tree was cut about 8-12 feet above the ground. Now that the General Noble Tree and its neighbors are gone, the area is filled with underbrush and smaller trees that are a strong contrast to the Sequoias that use to fill this area, and keep it free of other groundcover. We were trading off taking pictures of each other in front of the stump, when my daughter edged a little back into the underbrush and then wheeled around, concern written all over her face.

"I just heard something move back there", she whispered. I tried not to look concerned, and attempted to reassure her by citing the wind, a squirrel, or something equally unthreatening; however, my mind was otherwise completely occupied by the other possibility. She raised the camera, and then quickly dropped it. "I heard it again", she said, her voice quivering a little more. "Well," I said, "let’s head back to the car, then, just to be safe." I took her hand, or put my arm around her shoulder or did something fatherly, I think. I tried to downplay the odds that a bear was behind us, and at the same time, remind ourselves just what to do if we were wrong about that. My keys firmly clenched in my right hand, I was ready to jingle them like crazy, and I was really hoping that bears hated that sound as much as I’d been told they did.

Continued in Part II

Continued from Part I

The car seemed a long, long way away. I summoned up the nerve to look over my shoulder occasionally, an act that took a lot of willpower. If there was a bear behind us, we’ll never know. I don’t think there was. But when I looked behind me for the third time or so, my eye and brain immediately picked up something moving back there.

It was probably a branch swaying, but no bear could possibly have generated a bigger adrenaline dump in my bloodstream than the one I experienced right then. I realized that I’d never truly understood the fight-or-flight response before. Although I don’t remember it, I must have checked the trail again, because nothing else explains the fact that I grabbed my daughter and ‘walked rapidly’ instead of dragging her behind me in a full out sprint. She told me later that she looked back and mistook a stump for a bear, but was happy to respond to my suggestion that we ‘walk a little faster’.

When we got back to the car, I was shaking enough that it took both hands to unlock the door. I can’t remember if we signed out on the log—I think I did. I did a ‘Y’ turn to head back up the hill we’d descended, but the combination of the steepness, the rutting, and the loose dirt and gravel brought us to a halt about half way up. I backed down the hill, and tried again. No luck. I snuck a quick look over at my daughter; she looked flat out scared. "If we don’t make the hill, we can always turn around and go the other way around the loop," I reassured her. She nodded, but all of her body language said she wasn’t comforted by that thought. The third try wasn’t any more successful, and I made another Y-turn and headed further into the forest.

It was right about now that she told me about the prints on the car door. She’d seen two dusty prints on the window and doorframe on her side; I hadn’t noticed anything while trying to summon enough fine motor skills to fit the key in the lock. At the time, I was sure they were from our hands; later, she told me she was convinced they weren’t ours, and especially weren’t hers. "When did I rub my hands in any dirt?" she argued. She had me there.

Meanwhile, the trip around the loop was proving less straightforward then I anticipated. The map showed the road heading mostly west, and then turning sharply north. I could tell that we were heading more southwest than west, and every curve in the road turned us further in that direction. The forest canopy had closed in, and the road was narrowing; ferns and branches were brushing against the car as we passed.

It wasn’t sundown, but it was 6pm. The sunshine had been covered up by clouds, and it was pretty dim as the road finally turned sharply north. I felt like we’d driven about three times as far as I’d expected to, and suddenly realized I should be paying more attention to my surroundings in case we had to retrace our steps. It made me realize the adrenaline was still rumbling around my brain, making clear thinking a little more difficult.

The map showed the western edge of our loop to be a little longer than what we’d just traveled. I now had to slow my speed to take the bumps, and to reduce the feeling that the branches were scratching up the rental car. I noticed that it was hard to shake the feeling that something was behind us. Now at its narrowest, the road finally turned back to the east, giving us both some new confidence.

That’s when we found the route blocked by a locked gate, and that’s when I really panicked. It was an unlocked gate that led to trouble in Oregon; that distinction didn’t seem too important at the time. I think my daughter noticed the change in my demeanor, and it unsettled her further. I threw the car into reverse, and tried to turn around on the narrow road. I immediately heard the frame scraping over a fallen log, just before I backed into a tree on the road’s edge. It took three cycles of drive to reverse to drive before I could make enough room to change directions, each time wondering if I was being careful enough to avoid pulling forward or backward onto a slope I couldn’t get off. As we finally got going again, I thought that it would have been good to pay more attention to that question. The adrenaline wasn’t having any of it, though.

Now I really worked hard to make sure I wasn’t missing any intersection on the way back. We got back to the point where I started paying attention, and hoped there weren’t any forks on this part of the drive. I quickly started enumerating the options out loud, this time for both of us. "We can try the hill again. I didn’t push it too hard before, because we thought we could just go the other way." My daughter nodded, unconvinced. "I didn’t put it in low gear before, so we can try that. And I didn’t push the car to help it up the hill, either." Talking helped, but both of us were swallowing hard. I was trying to figure out how I could push and drive on a hill at the same time, without endangering the car itself. Should I push and let my 13-year-old drive for the first time? Even through the adrenaline, I could see the limitations of that idea. "And if we have to, we can get out and walk back and get help from those people at the campsite." She nodded again. "It’s not too far, maybe 12 or 15 minutes." I could tell she didn’t want any part of getting out of the car right where our troubles had started.

Thankfully, our first try in low gear brought us up the hill, with only a little loss of traction along the way. As it often does, the relief brought a manic level of conversation, nervous laughter, and "I was really scared when…" recollections of the experience. We drove by the two campsites, and even though both groups went about their business, it was really nice to see cars and RVs and especially people.

We must have driven back through Grant Grove, but again, I don’t recall a thing about that passage. We took the southwestern arm of the ‘Wye’ and headed for the park gate and the Big Stump entrance. As we neared it, I slowed down and turned into the facility, which was much larger than any of the other gates we’d encountered at Sequoia or Kings Canyon, built to accommodate the crowds that come to Grant Grove from Fresno. It was nearing 7 pm, and only one or two of the half-dozen entrance booths were staffed. I turned around in the parking lot so I could head in as if I were arriving at the park. I explained to the ranger that we were leaving, but I had a question. "We just came from the Chicago Stump, out in the National Forest?" I realized I was making a question of my statement. He looked puzzled. "You know the big tree that was cut in the 1890’s, off to the west of the highway?" He started rummaging around for the same park map I was holding. "Well, anyways, we almost got stuck down there, and I was just wondering if the roads in that area were always that rough." He looked up from the map, and spoke for the first time: "You mean there are roads down there?"

Once again, John Muir bequeathed this area an entirely appropriate yet simple name. Amid these giant trees, and the remnant glacial boulders on the hillsides, it does feel like you’ve stumbled into an environment on another planet. The sequoias are so tall and wide that they’re nearly unphotographable. Attempts to capture one, either up close or from a distance, are frustrated by their impressive tendency to grow close together: backing up to get one tree in frame brings you past a dozen more that now block your view. That’s made possible by their relatively small root system, which takes up a surprisingly small amount of space, making them vulnerable to wind. As you hike the trails in any of the groves here, you’ll come across a few that have toppled, which always generated a sad feeling in me, particularly when the dead tree had been hacked into a house, or bored through to create an auto tunnel, or a passage way along a trail. No respect for the dead.

I can’t escape the feeling that the sequoias are generous to allow us into their home. On their unfathomable time scale, our 100-year flurry of activity, with all its attendant changes in intentions, must look comical. We arrive, we cut trees, we build roads, we construct a small city, we save trees, we tear down the city, and we move off of their property.

The meadows that dot Giant Forest serve as a reminder of the narrow niche they occupy. Dependent on water, the meadows contain too much water, filling depressions in the granite with runoff from the surrounding area. The sequoias thrive on the edges, drinking up the moisture as it trickles into the small basin. The beautiful open spaces, lush greenery and blue skies provide a contrast that enhances one’s appreciation of the trees and their forest: they’re all the more amazing when you see the openings, the places where they’re not.

As the evidence mounts that our planet is warming, I wonder how rapidly they’ll be threatened. Their niche is a small one, and they thrive where temperature, moisture, and slope are just right. Elevation changes of a few hundred feet eliminate their ability to grow; a temperature increase of a few degrees certainly has a equivalent elevation change in that neighborhood.

Even with the removal of the Village, the Giant Forest area is still rumbling with human activity. The trail map looks like a random web of threads, and we encountered a lot of company on the trails on our mid-day hike near Crescent Meadow. The next morning, we had General Sherman and the Congress Trail to ourselves, an experience that still stays with me, and left me hungry for more time and more quiet.

There are 30 groves within Sequoia and Kings Canyon, only a handful of which are marked on the park map (the highly visited Giant Forest and General Grant Groves; Lost and Redwood Mountain Groves along Generals Highway; Muir and Atwell Groves reachable by a few miles from park roads, and the more remote Garfield and Cottonwood Groves near Seqouia’s southern boundary). We spent time in the first four, often alone; but hiking to some of the others will definitely be a focus of my next visit.