Bear Country

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Geo: 36.5077, -118.575

It took us a little over a three hour drive to get to Buckeye Flat Campground at Sequoia National Park. Unfortunately, I had some sort of stomach bug so I was pretty nauseous this entire trip. I toughed it out anyway. Chris and I have this mantra as parents now, "We're always going to be tired." It's just our faces at this point. So we might as well enjoy life, travel and do what we dream of anyway because we're never not going to be tired and we're often going to be sick since our toddler is a little petri dish of germs. That being said, we chose to camp in the foothills of the park. What I didn't realize beforehand was that even though on a driving map the campground appears very close to the popular tourist sights, you actually have to spend a good 45minutes switchback driving up a giant cliff to get there. It's not close at all, and the landscape and temperatures are vastly different between the two areas. Buckeye Flat would reach 90 degrees by 10am every morning. The surrounding environment were small trees perfect for hammocking (and actually this was the only campground this summer that allowed us to use our hammock), scrub and grasses. No redwood trees. However, there was an amazing river with a swimming hole right by the campground that was an easy 1/4mile walk, and it was the entire reason we chose this campground. It's worth it, and it's worth being so far removed from the tourist sites in the heat.

We arrived to our campsite, set up camp and were immediately feeling overheated. We didn't feel like swimming just yet so instead of checking out the swimming hole we hopped back into our air-conditioned Flex like spoiled tourists and ventured further into the park. We first headed to the store at Lodgepole Village to get cold drinks. We wandered around the Visitor Center, and then headed back the way we came. I thought we might be able to get a small hike in but it was getting late. So we wandered around Beetle Rock, admiring the sunset. I heard, in Spanish, "Oso" and thought, uh oh. We avoided the bears on the way to the Visitor Center at the Giant Forest but ran into them on our way back to our car. It was a Mama bear and her two cubs. They seemed content 500ft away from us. We quickly took a few pictures and kept walking.

When we got back to camp, Arya and I played in the hammock while Chris cooked dinner. We ended up sleeping pretty early. The nice thing about camping in small trees is you have a clear view of the stars. I love just staring at them through our tent.

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