Showing posts with label giant Sequoias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label giant Sequoias. Show all posts

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Wuksachi Lodge and Grants Grove (Day 2 of Sequoia Holiday)

Morning at the Wuksachi Lodge dawned silent and tinged with gold. Bill and I woke around five, opened the curtains, pulled on a few clothes, then sat to meditate. When I opened, the snow-capped mountain towering above the trees seemed within walking distance and a spider-web shimmered in the white spruce outside, light streaking across its fibers in a gentle breeze.

At breakfast that morning, the lodge dining room was filled with families, many speaking with defined British accents and the children, all of them, incredibly well behaved. A little Asian boy with delicate features and bed-mussed hair eating pancakes at the next table made me smile as did a 10-year-old miss with the curly blonde hair eating with her giant of a father the table beyond that. From floor to ceiling, windows brought the surrounding landscape – mountains, snow, woods – right into the dining room. Our table was bathed in so much light that I could have used a pair of sunglasses, but it felt warm and welcoming after a brisk walk from our suite in the Sequoia building to the Lodge.

After breakfast, while Bill went for a heart-stimulating power-walk around the grounds, I wrote in my journal. Then I took my own more leisurely stroll, camera in hand, to capture the views from different points – a walk made merry by the song birds that filled the air with music and flitted through the trees or hopped onto the path before me. Despite the rapidly warming weather the snow was still deep around the lodge and I was surprised at how little run-off I saw; I could only surmise that the ground was so dry that it caught every drop of moisture it could.

Bill and I reconnected around 9:30, gathered our cameras and wallets, and set off to see the marvels still ahead of us along a section of the highway not nearly as precipitous as the drive up from the Ash Mountain park entrance had been. Our destination was the General Grant Grove of giant Sequoias but at the still snow bound Dorst Creek campgrounds, the Lost Grove of giant sequoias towering above us demanded we stop.

A young woman on a small electric wheelchair, whizzed past us, intent on following the sun on the cinnamon bark of the Sequoias from tree to tree. Meanwhile her husband talked to a park employee who was emptying the bear-proof garbage receptacles placed generously at many of the pull-off along the trail. Which brings me to the subject of bears. Apparently there are lots of hungry black bears in the park. That morning we’d just missed seeing a mother with two cubs stroll through the Lodge parking lot.

The Nation’s Christmas Tree – photo by hubby Bill Christ

Bill and I stopped for a lunch of teriyaki chicken and tempura vegetables on yellow rice at the Kings Canyon Visitor Center. Unusual park fare don’t you think? Afterwards, a short drive up the road took us to the largest known grove of giant sequoias--Grants Grove. Several of the most massive trees grow here, including the General Grant (aka the Nation’s Christmas Tree), with a trunk measuring 40 feet in diameter! A series of trails, some still packed in snow lead us past these immense forest lords and into one of them -- a massive fallen sequoia that had once housed an ale house within its interior!

Beryl inside the entrance to the fallen Sequoia that once served as a bar. Photo by hubby Bill Christ

We left the grove, intending to drive to Kings Canyon Lodge but the drive was so sheer and convoluted and the mountain scenery so barren that a sign saying the road was closed several miles ahead encouraged us to turn around. The outlook at Junction View, the place where we did this turning, convinced us. It gave us a clear view of ongoing S curves snaking downwards into the canyon for what seemed an eternity.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Take a hair-raising ride to wondrous (Day 1 of Sequoia Holiday)

The Sentinel -- an average giant

When we set off earlier this week for the Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks we had no idea “where” these parks were. We knew only what the map told us: that they lay several hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles, but not that these parks are some 7,000 feet high in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range and are reached by several hundred hair-raising S turns with precipitous drops on one side or the other. “Take a look at that view,” my hubby Bill said and I replied “Yes. Yes,” while clutching the passenger seat in a white-knuckled death grip and mentally reminding myself to “Breathe.”

Breathing was definitely easier when we were on the inside of the General’s Highway and when Bill wasn’t noting the magnificent view while racing past them! Actually, Bill drives mountain roads with skill, acquired by years of negotiating similar roads in the Colorado Rockies. Contrarily I have not been so trained or inured. And I have a terror of heights, notwithstanding that I happened to love doing the ropes course on an Outward Bound close to my 60th birthday.

The sights that greeted us when we met our first giant Sequoias, however, made potential heart-failure worthwhile. We were in awe! I felt something akin to spiritual ecstasy in the presence of these towering forest divinities with their massive cinnamon-colored trunks. We stopped to take photos of the ones we met along the way, having no idea that they were of “average” proportion with trunk diameter of only 20-30 feet. No, ahead of us, awaited the General Grant with its 40 foot diameter, and the largest tree in the world by volume, The General Sherman.

When reading about the giant Sequoias I'd somehow pictured an entire forest filled with only these massive trees. I did not realize that they exist within a varied environment with Sugar Pines, Red Firs, Western Azaleas, Sierra Laurel and the like. Nor did I realize that the cones of these huge beings were as small as chicken eggs. Theirs were not the 13-18 inch long cones of the Sugar Pines, or even the 6-8 inch cones of the Western White Pine.

The General Sherman (note the fence asking visitors to stay on the other side as the roots of these giants are vulnerable)

Standing in silence under these greatest of all Sierra trees -- many of which average 2,000 or more years in age (the oldest being estimated at 3,200 years), I pondered the historical events that had taken place while they were growing: the volcanic eruption devastating the island of Thera in Greece, the rule of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, the start of the Iron Age, the first Olympic Games, the writing of the Hebrew Bible, the wisdom of Buddha, the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth and so on.

This man is on the wrong side of the fence. Maybe he can't read.

I felt as if I were standing in the presence sages who, if asked, could predict the future of life on this planet based on what they’d witnessed as humankind progressed from the use of iron tools to the transmission of information through the Ethernet, and nature has been simultaneously altered by our "advancement," as attested to by San Joaquin Valley smog through which we drove on our way into the Sierra's . . . smog that drifts perniciously upward into the highlands where these Sequoias grow.

The challenge that confronts us visitors to view and honor these amazing trees is that even our visit contributes to that smog. That despite our efforts to live in as green a manner as we can, the fact that we eat and heat and drive and use cell phones, carries an invisible carbon footprint.
Now that's a hair-raising thought.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune named Beryl as a "Best of 2006 Minnesota Authors." Her book The Scent of God was a “Notable” Book Sense selection for April 2006.




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