Blogs from Sequoia National Park, California, United States, North America

Dear All Wahey! My California Road Trip 2024 has officially begun! On a Wednesday morning, I said goodbye to my cosy Lawndale motel and picked up a hire car near LAX Airport - a black Nissan SUV. I faced the dreaded LA freeway system, and found that despite a bit of slower moving traffic, it wasn't all that bad. After around 30 minutes of urban sprawl, driving north through Hollywood and Burbank, the surrounding landscape turned to curvaceous and sparsely vegetated mountains, as the highway passed through Angeles National Park. While I loved the places I visited in LA, the city as a whole wasn't my favourite, and I was glad to be leaving. I think it was a combination of unfriendly people and massive urban concrete sprawl that just didn't do it for me, and ... read more

Having stoken the fire high the night before & topped it up just before 2am it had still gone cold by the time we woke in the early morning! The free tea & coffee (available 24/7) helped us warm up as we packed, then after breakfast we loaded the car & set off to Sequoia National park in the sunshine. We parked at the Giant Forest Museum to hike the Moro Rock - Cresent Meadow trail. The Cresent Meadow Road was still closed for winter so we were hoping it would be fairly quiet over there. There was a small stream of folks visting Moro Rock, we took a brief detour up to Hanging Rock to admire the view, which was good in spite of a lot of low cloud, but the altitude of the park ... read more

Second blog of the trip...I'm already running late, but trust me, it's only going to go worst! Smile! We left Bakersfield north to the Sequoia National Park. This is a first for me. The idea is to do a huge loop around the park before driving to LA before night fall. I stopped at the Ranger Station to find out we don't actually need the pass to go into the park with our itinerary. I wanted to buy the yearly pass covering all National Parks. We'll need it later on, and it's only 80usd for everybody in the car. Sadly they run out of them more than 2 weeks ago. The ranger told us, the place to stop and walk is the Trail of 100 Giants. We did and spend some pretty cool time there. There ... read more

I spent a week and half in California again on my way back to Washington. Last spring I did not get the chance to visit Sequoia/King Canyon National Park or Yosemite so that was my focus this time. I stayed in Visalia which is close to Sequoia National Park and I lucked out when I found out they had just opened the road between Sequoia and King Canyon that day so I was able to do the whole loop through both. The trees in Sequoia are amazing to see along with the mountain scenery. It is interesting to see the Sequoia as they change from young trees to the huge elder trees. King Canyon still had quite a bit of snow and the views were well worth the drive. I next went to Midpines which is ... read more

Geo: 36.5077, -118.575Today we got up, ate breakfast and packed up to set out on a roadtrip to Kings Canyon in the far northern part of the region. I had heard the valley there paralleled Yosemite Valley so I was excited to see it.It ended up being an all day drive. Our first stop was at a small lookout with a view of the Kings Canyon range in the distance. It had a neat quote at the info podium-"We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." - William Stegner.It reminded me of my upcoming backpacking trips. I'd never backpacked before ... read more