Sequoia

Sequoia National Park yesterday, and once again I was speechless! The directions said that the entrance to the park is only 7 miles from our camp, which indeed, it is, so we decided it would be a morning outing – juice and biscuits and home for lunch – a decision which our growling stomachs greatly regretted around lunchtime!

Then the wait for the roadworks – they are in the process of repairing the road that has been carved out of the mountain, and in some places they have actually built a scaffold from the road below, to be able to work on the one up higher on the rock face! Somewhere an inspired band of civil engineers are scratching their heads as they ponder the challenges posed by such a repair…


 After a 45 minute
wait we were led – by now a long row of cars – up past the road works by a guide car, who drives up and down the 3 mile section on the hour every hour all through the day, allowing tourists through!

The drive up was beautiful, a winding road and sudden amazing vistas of huge rock crags towering miles into the sky. The colors in the bush made me want to reach for a paintbrush or my threads – how many shades of green would I need to capture the exact variety, I wonder? The redbud trees are in full bloom at the moment, and that, combined with the electric green of new oak leaves and the many other trees that are blooming too, create a color palette that would be impossible to replicate.

The Giant Forest, with the enormous General Sherman Tree, was worth all the time it took to get there. This is the largest growing tree in the world, 275 ft tall, estimated 2 200 years old, with a base circumference of 33 meters. It is difficult to describe the awe that such a giant inspires, surrounded as it is by an army of giants not very much smaller.