After we left Yosemite, we meandered over and stayed in Fresno and drove over to King's Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, which are kind of smooshed together. Almost right away we found a little patch of snow for the boys to play in, which made them happy. Little did they now what was coming up.
First up, some really big trees.
General Grant Tree, aka The Nation's Christmas Tree. This side shows the fire damage. According to the plaques, if they don't get fires put out as soon as possible, the fire can burn inside the trees for weeks.
Walking inside a carved out tree. They boys thought this was pretty cool.
Not sure exactly which river this is (I think we saw a sign that said Roaring River). We followed it for quite a ways, mostly from above, until we were right level with it. They have so much snow runoff that all of the rivers are insane.
From what we could tell, the river normally only goes on the right now side of these trees. There was just so much water that there's no where for it to go. We watched various logs travel down the river (can't really say float, because they were moving pretty good and getting thrown around).
Why isn't Rick in this picture? Well, Jacob very sweetly asked for his swim trunks and was not happy when Dad said no and took off for the river. He stopped on his own, but he was not happy. As far as we can tell, he thought the froth was bubbles and wanted to go in and play.
Further down the road was Grizzly Falls
If you click the picture to make it bigger, in the center of the pic is Jacob with his arms out wide, soaking up the spray.
And then it was on to Roaring River Falls.
Jacob thought it was lame that we would only let him play right here on the edge where he was protected from falling in by another line of boulders. Luckily for us, this was the last of the stops by the water, because the child was seriously considering mutiny by this point.
More big trees, but this time you could stand in them and look around.
That little speck toward the bottom is Brandon.
Tree hugger
At Little Baldy Saddle we found more snow to play in. A lot more.
On the walk down to General Sherman Tree, we came across this guy:
And here's the really big tree:
It's impossible to show the size of the trees in a picture, so here's Brandon standing in front of a cross section:
Look who we found as we were on the road to leave the park. :) We've now seen Black Bears in the wild in Canada, Wyoming and California.
And we couldn't resist driving through the tree tunnel; notice Brandon waving out the window.