Kings Canyon / Sequoia National Park

Day 100

The big 1-0-0. One hundreds days of travel and we celebrate the event in the Sierra Nevada mountains. These vast behemoths are take your breath away beautiful. This mountain range is home to MT Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48. We started out the day with a trip to the King's Canyon visitor center and made a plan from there. The General Grant tree was just down the road and worth a stop. In these parks lie the giant sequoias, the largest living organisms on earth. General Grant was discovered in 1862. He's 267 ft tall and 40.3 ft at the base. 

Once again the pictures don't fully capture the essence of the woods. Hundreds of enormous sequoias surround the area around General Grant.

In the spirit of being thorough I attempted to show you at ground level what these things are like. A short trail leads visitors to a downed sequoia that's been hollowed out by hundreds of years of weather and fire.

Time to roll. There's tons fo stuff to see here and we'd like to cram it into one day. Next on the list is the Chicago stump. Shirley rumbles up the road and hits 6,000 ft in eleveation. The road turns to gravel and the stump is 3 miles deep into the woods. 

Down the road we see the trailhead off to the right. Is that it? The road keeps going. We should see where it goes.

The studious reader will see the "don't drive your damn car here" sign. Sweet. I love this stuff. The road gets steep and we are trundling through at about 7 mph. There's a tree laying across the road about 6 inches around with a lot branches sticking out. No problem. I'll just drive through it. Another 30 minutes clicks by until we find our way back out. Nothing here but burnt stumps and woods. Back to the Chicago stump we go.

Representing Chi-town. Hope we don't get shot.

A stump... that's right. This big ass stump was estimated to be around 3,200 years old when they cut it down. Two men worked on it for 9 days before the mighty tree fell.

Back to the pavement and we went down to see General Sherman. This tree is the one to see. The parking lot is packed and people are everywhere. What's the big deal? Sherman currently holds the title as the largest living tree in the world by volume.​ If man decided to log Sherman it would take roughly 30 train cars just to move the wood from the trunk. This isn't counting the branches. At 130 ft up from the base is a branch that's 7 ft in diameter and 140 ft long.

The hike down to him wasn't too bad. However it's worth pointing out we are at 7,000 ft in elevation. I've found something out about myself on this trip. My body doesn't like elevation. Over 8,000 ft and I start to get a headache. Shirley doesn't care much for it either. She grumbles back to life and it's down the road to drive through a tree. Not as exciting as we thought it'd be, but still cool.

See the missing center cap on the wheel? It's been bothering the crap out of me since it happened. I know this is an old jeep and it gets beat up. That's fine, but this is just unacceptable. I even know where it's at... kinda. I noticed it was missing after we spent that day bombing up a 4wd only road in Whiskeytown a couple weeks back. *Sigh*
No more time to be in despair. We're finally heading back home to call it a day. Eli is waiting for us and we're both just ready to sit on the couch. No regrets though, one hell of a way to spend day 100.