Nightglow Window

King's Canyon National Park

It's a long day of driving, but gorgeous.

We leave early from Terry and Debbie's. It was a great visit and a lot of fun, but I'm looking forward to the next few days a great deal.

We slide back and forth down the rotten curves of State Route 190 to the base of the foothills.

This gigantic bug richochets off the side mirror and flies into the car and Christy freaks out, then Sydney does as well. A truck is on our ass and there's no place to turn out, but I still should have kept my cool better as Christy screams for me to "pull over."

Ah, well.

Sequoia National Park is stellar, with more mammoth trees and deep fern-carpeted forest floors. More crowded than the less-glamorous groves to the south, but it's easy to see why this is a National Park.

We stop for pizza for lunch and then zoom down, down, down into King's Canyon, stopping for gas near the bottom of the steep grade at an old fashioned gravity-feed gas pump from 1928. You can see the amber fuel pour down out of the glass-topped pump.

It's hot. We've dropped from 7,000 feet to 4,000 and it's summer again.

With our gas gauge out of the red, he head up the narrows to Cedar Grove and road's end.

King's Canyon National Park is coy, revealing her wonders only to those willing to make an effort. Unlike Yosemite, who spreads her treasures for any passerby willing to drive through the Wawona tunnel, King's Canyon demurs. But make no mistake, its backcountry is the best in the Sierra, and pulling around the parking lot at road's end makes me want to get back into backpacking in the worst way.

Another fire is here, just above the road on the canyon walls, but it's burning slowly and the National Park Service is letting it do its natural thing of clearing out the underbrush.

Not a lot of smoke in the canyon, but we ask a ranger and she says once it cools down in the evening, the campsites smell smoky.

The nice thing is the fire has cleared pretty much everyone off and we find a great site at Sheep Creek Campground and stick our feet in the cool waters of the King River as the sun begins to set.

We're still full from our late lunch, so we make more S'mores, and then it's off to bed. All of us in the six-person REI tent reminds me a lot of all those nights camping last summer.

The smoke has crowded out the stars.


Sequoia National Park


The King's Canyon narrows


Hannah at Sheep Creek campground.


The Kings River near Sheep Creek campground.


Sydney cools her feet.