Day 14

Day 14

Today we went to the Giant Forrest, named this by John Muir who is a influential figure in preserving the two of the first national parks Sequoia and Yosemite. We had a reserved spot in the same camp ground for tonight we just had to wait for the campers their now to pack up and leave.  I have always been surprised how fast campers wake up, tear down their site and leave, except for this couple. They took forever to break down and we had to wait for almost two hours before we could finally pick up our tent and carry it over.

Today was the opening of the summer season for the park so the shuttles opened up. We took the shuttle to Morro rock/ Crescent Meadow because our camping neighbors told us about how amazing the view was. We took a longer hike instead off the shuttle from the meadows to Morro. We hiked to the first viewpoint on the high sierra trail., then we hiked over to Morro rock through what is called “Bear Territory”, it is the area of the park that they see the most bears. Have I known that before we hiked through I would have taken our lunch out of the backpack I was carrying; instead I walked around as human bear bait. We started up the staircase to the top of Morro rock which is a staircase of about 200 hundred straight up, steep and slim stairs. Once you get to the top the trek up is all worth it. There is such a beautiful view of the sierra’s and the other mountains. We ate our lunch up there dodging the crows and the swooping swallows that were speeding by us. Then headed back down.

Next we headed over to Giant forest, which is largest grove of sequoias, it has about 7000-8000 Giant Sequoias. We started at the museum to learn about the trees, such as the Giant sequoia is the biggest in volume but the Redwood on the coast of California is the tallest. We also learned that the sequoias need thousands of gallons of water and will evaporate about ten thousand gallons a day. When one of the Sequoias fell, water poured out. The biggest tree in the world is General Sherman. We barely could get the entire tree in the picture it is so big. We also went to visit General Grant, which is the third biggest tree. We found some of the other record-breaking trees and we had a lot of fun crawling through the holes and gaps in the trees. We hiked on the some of the trails in the giant forest and it was just amazing to stand next to these Giants, David was even afraid of them they were so big. After we hike around we went drove over to drive through the log tunnel, which is a tunnel that you can drive through that they made out of a fallen tree. We also walked through some other tunnel logs and went to see the auto log which was a popular drive way on a fallen tree until it was closed due to rotting of old age.

After our day among the Giants we headed back to camp, had another pasta dinner and David did another dance with the fire which was really good until he tripped on a piece of wood a landed in the fire, luckily the great caught so he didn’t get hurt but this furthered David’s battle with building fires. We went to bed so we can get up early to try and get a camping spot in Yosemite for the weekend, Memorial Day weekend.