Natural extremes…biggest living thing…day 5

After our short night, we had a quick breakfast in the room, loaded the car back up, figured out how to put snow chains on our van, and checked out.

After being overwhelmed by the redwoods on a previous vacation, we had high hopes for the sequoias. We were disappointed. We don’t want to read too much into this one experience, since there were many factors setting us up for disappointment: (1) we didn’t have much time at the Sequoia National Park; (2) we took a vacation with probably the worst ages of children for seeing something boring like trees; (3) we were operating on not much sleep; (4) we really wanted to get to our next destination at a reasonable hour, so our goal was just to get a couple pictures and get out of there.

We ended up stopping to see only one tree: General Sherman. It’s the biggest living thing in the world, measured by volume, so that’s something. But it was .4 miles from the parking lot, with Marina whining the whole way and Cora whining unless she was walking.

We also were a little worried about running out of gas. We entered the park with half a tank. After driving up a mountain for 20 miles, we had a quarter tank. The pass to the north was closed, which meant we had to return the way we came in. That meant downhill the whole way. If we had to continue going up, we may not have made it (there’s no gas stations in the park).

So one tree, plus a few random sequoias we saw on the drive through the park. The scenery is pretty great, but we ended up being there only about 13 hours, most of it in the dark. In hindsight, we would have skipped Sequoia, stopped much earlier in the evening at a much cheaper hotel, avoided the midnight ice mountain climb, and everyone would have been happy. But that’s hindsight. If you do have a choice, though, the redwoods in northern California were more impressive, more accessible, and more plentiful than the sequoias, based on our single experience with each.

The rest of the day went fine. Justin discovered that the 1130pm pass we hit the night before was the only one of the night; if we were 20 minutes later, we would have had to turn around, go back down the ice mountain, find another place to sleep, and likely get charged for our original reservation. That would have been a very bad night.

We arrived at our rented house in Yosemite around 530pm, just as it was getting dark. We unpacked, got kids fed and in bed, and crashed.