We saw some really great stuff today, but it's dinner time and early to bed so we can get started early tomorrow.
I think I can tell you about today while Poppa has coffee in the morning.
YAAAWWWWNNNN! Good night!
Tigger
O.K., I feel better now!
Oops - my picture of baby sequoias yesterday wasn't really baby sequoias. My bad.
So yesterday we went to Sequoia National Park. We left the campground again in the valley and the road started up. Where the fields weren't irrigated, the landscape looked like this:
Then the hills started to get some trees:
A little further up, we could look back and see nothing but orchards and groves (orchards for fruit trees, groves for nut trees?)
On the way up, we saw this sign advertising a 382-acre ranch for sale:
If you look really close at the picture below, you can see the same sign:
Poppa wants to know if the 382 acres are measured on the slope or in cross-section (whatever that means). He said you'd have to import cows from West Virginia to do any ranching.
This sign, at around 4,000 feet, actually faces away from the highway. When it snows, they turn it around and turn on the lights. They got 7 feet of snow in one storm last year:
We had seen some sequoias the day before at Kings Canyon, but there were even more today. We learned that sequoias have to compete for sunlight with lots of other tall trees, so they grow tall first and then start getting bigger around: "600 years getting tall, then a couple thousand years getting fat." Sounds like people but on a longer time-scale.
Inside the park, we came to a wide section of road with parking spaces, but no sign. We stopped quickly and got out. We were surrounded by sequoias! We were the only people (and Tigger) there, and it was totally silent - not a sound. Our voices sounded muffled, with a little echo. It was like we were using our "inside voices" in a cathedral. Every car that came through stopped, and the people just got out and stared at the trees. Here are some pictures:
Nana hugs a new friend:
It's hard to believe how big they are. One travel site reports: An easy walk on the quarter-mile (one-way) Chicago Stump Trail leads to the stump of the General Noble Tree, which was cut down, chopped into pieces, and then reassembled and displayed at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Some fairgoers refused to believe that a tree could grow so big and dubbed it "the California hoax."
We saw General Sherman, the biggest tree in the world (by volume). Some trees are taller and some trees are bigger around, but none are taller AND bigger around:
Then it was time to go back to the trailer. Back home in Pennsylvania, we have "Adopt a Highway" campaigns, where people take care of trash along a section of highway. The signs acknowledging them are fairly formal: "Employees of Consol Energy", "Friends and Family of the late Dr. Smith", "The Arthur Vining Davis Foundation". Here in California, they're more casual:
This place rescues BIG cats from bad homes. We wanted to stop and meet my cousins, but they were closed:
When we left the park at 7,000 feet, it was 53 degrees. Half an hour later at the campground, it was 81 degrees!
Poppa's finished with coffee, so we're off to Yosemite National Park.
Posted from Nana's iPad
Location:N Piedra Rd,Sanger,United States
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