Reflections of My Travel

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The plan was to get a good, early start. Those who know me know that doesn’t really happen too well. Lucky for me, our friends aren’t too quick on the morning motivation either. We got a later-than-planned start but we arrived at Sequoia National Park mid-morning. Turns out, there are some pretty darned big trees in the world. I was astounded by the size of these things. Especially when I was jaw-dropped in front of one and the sign next to it said that it was just an average one. We climbed Moro Rock to look out over the surrounding landscape. It was pretty. I’m sure that it was absolutely gorgeous before the days of smog. I’ll have to say that the very well defined purple haze took something away from it. It’s bad when they even have an informative placard all about the smog. We then made our way to the General Sherman, which is the largest tree in the world, by volume. There was a branch that had fallen off of it last year that was bigger than most Georgia trees I’ve seen. When it fell, the impact sunk it about two feet into the surrounding dirt and shattered the sidewalk it landed on. Huge, I tell you. The last big stop we made in the park was at the General Grant tree which is the third largest in the world, by volume, and the largest in the world around the base. The diameter of the base is forty feet. Massive. While in that section of the forest, we went by the Robert E Lee tree which was roped off because Rangers were climbing it and conducting extensive surveys on it. The really interesting thing about that was that they informed us that they found an eight foot tall pine tree growing on one of the upper branches. I wish we could have seen that. After leaving Sequoia, we headed to Yosemite National Park. Since it was late in the afternoon, we planned to drive through the south side to the Mariposa exit, where our hotel would be, and see what we could see along the way. We stopped at some scenic pull-offs to take photos of El Capitan and we did the short hike (walk really) to Bridal Veil Falls. There was a rainbow across the waterfall which was very pretty, but it was easy to see that we are here the wrong time of year for water falls. It was more than a trickle, but not by much. I saw postcards of it that were magnificent though.