DAY 65... 5/31/11 - “Gentle Giants” (still in Visalia, CA)

Whew!  We're only 19' long.

Today we left the campground for the day in short sleeves and sandals.  We drove 50 miles east to Sequoia National Park.  

And they're not kidding!

About 20 miles after we left Visalia we started climbing and from 300 feet at the start - we ended up some time later at 7345 feet in SNOW!  

There wasn't any on the road today, another whew!

Yep - I have on my sandals!

The Sequoia’s are awesome trees, as you can see by the pictures (or not).  The forest is huge, the roads only cover a fraction of the park, and only on the west side.  


[The Forest is 1.1 million acres, the Park is 402,051 acres and the Monument - created by Bill Clinton - is 328,000 acres.  Again, pictures do not do the scenery justice... you’re just going to have to come out here some time.

Sentinel and Davis

Sherman

That's Big Baldie behind us.

We saw the “Sentinel”,  “General Sherman”, and lots of other trees larger than anything we have seen before.  Sherman is the largest (not tallest or oldest *) tree in the WORLD.  It’s top has died but it keeps getting larger around each year.  The trees grow best between 5000 and 7000 feet in Altitude.  The Sentinel is about 2200 years old and the General is about 3000 years old... makes us feel pretty young!

Yep, that's us and we're not so old after all!

Back home this pine would be considered huge, but
here it's just another kinda big tree.

Of course there is!
One lane open every hour, one way.

Even in the Federal Park!

Back to camp for dinner, and a maybe a movie (don’t know what Heather has planned... she is in charge of dinner and entertainment).

We know all about the black bears.  One tore up
our lashed-down cooler in the NC mountains.

Shalom, Davis . . .

Home sweet Visalia home.

*FYI: California has 'em all!

The tallest living tree in the world is Hyperion in Redwood National Park; it is 378.1 feet tall. The oldest living single tree in the world is a White Mountains, California, bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) called Methuselah; it is thought to be 4 to 5 thousand years old (there are older trees but they are actually a colony that clone themselves to attain their great age).