USA 2005

Thursday 11th August 2005 - Sequoia National Park

We had breakfast in the cafe attached to the camp ground's market. After breakfast, we drove about 3 miles to Crescent Meadow, where our chosen trail "Sierra High Trail" had its start. The kids had freaked a little (actually, a lot!) at the thought of a 11 mile hike and so we'd decided to walk as far down the trail as we wanted, but not all the way and then turn back.

The trail turned out to be wonderful, with the start taking us through an area of pines and mighty sequoias. After about half a mile though, we climbed out onto the flank of one side of a valley with awesome views of the Sierra Nevada mountain range on the other side. On the peaks on one or two mountains there were patches of white and a ranger that we met on the trail confirmed that this was indeed snow, still there from the previous winter when they'd had unusually high levels of precipitation. In fact our trail, if followed right to its very end point, was a 71 mile hike to Mount Whitney. One day, one day.....

Once again, we distributed the two 2-way radios amongst adults and kids so that Bekky and Jack could walk at their own pace (i.e. slowly!) without being out of contact. Impressively, using the radios for only the second time, it was on this hike that they mastered the art of "distance moaning": "Can we turn back now?", "Are we nearly there yet?!!!" etc!

After walking for an hour and a quarter, we reached pretty much the end of the valley we'd been hiking down and decided that was a good enough point to turn back at. So we returned to the car, having walked for about 2 and a half hours, probably covering about 4 miles. Martin would have loved to have gone further (Mount Whitney!) but it was enough for our two city kids :)

Back at our camp ground, we decided to have a fun and relaxing rest of day. It was now about 2 p.m. The day was beautiful; warm but not too hot and with a bright blue sky. We headed on down to the river that flows through the camp ground, only about 20 metres from where we were camped. Martin, Bekky and Jack donned swimming costumes and went in for a paddle (Jack) or swim (Bekky and Martin). It was icey cold, presumably being fed by mountain melt-water but once you were used to it it was lovely! A few other people had had the same idea and Bekky made friends with some american kids and stayed in the water for ages. Martin retreated like to a nice warm rock after half an hour and lay there in the sun like a lizard!

When everyone had had their fill of icey cold swimming, we headed to the market and stocked up with essentials like Corona Beer, ice cream, pretzels, wine and so on. This was to be our last evening in a national park, so why not enjoy it?

We had our evening meal about 6 p.m. and Martin lit another cammp fire using wood we had gathered ourselves. We played cards on into the evening.

Sequoia is lovely and more time here would have been great.

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