We drove up into the mountains to Sequoia national forest today – consistently beautiful views, and a changing landscape. I really wanted to see the Sequoia trees in the snow – and the few groves in Yosemite aren’t accessible at this time of year (or at least, not accessible without a 2-3 mile hike through snow in each direction – not something I’m capable of at the moment! So we found Grant’s Grove in Kings Canyon National Park – a reasonably easy drive from the valley. A beautiful drive in itself, constantly going up and down mountains – we’ve gone from sea level to ~5,000 feet at least twice today – once to the Sequoias, then back down to the valley, and back up to Yosemite.
The trees were amazingly huge, and the place overall was just magical. Very quiet and still because of the snow, and very few people. I can imagine it gets to be a bit of a zoo in the summer, but at this time of year we almost had it to ourselves. Photos really don’t do it justice – those trees are just unimaginably huge and amazing – some of them have been growing here over 1500 years. The tiny people at the bottom of this picture should give you some idea.
The visitor centre was just about totally buried in snow – as you can see in the photos they’ve dug out a passage to the front door, and there are a few gaps between the snow slowly sliding off the roof, and the snow on the ground.
We caught the last of the sunset in Yosemite just as we arrived through the tunnel – the first sight you get is of El Capitan and Half Dome across the valley from each other. To see it for the first time just as the sun had gone down was amazing.
We stayed in the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite. I was so tired I had trouble stringing sentences together, and it was the first place we came across. More expensive than we intended, but it’s an amazing place. It’s been there almost since the park was declared a national park. I overdid things a bit with all the walking around the sequoia trees – Bryan had to put up with a not very coherent me this evening, and I passed out pretty much as soon as I hit my bed, having been unable to work out how to upload my photos from the camera to the laptop! Thank you Bryan for copying them all over for me – I’m almost totally filling up my memory cards each day, so it can’t be postponed.