The Stars Align

8/17/2017

Another day in paradise! You know how sometimes your car just looks really exceptionally good? That was how Jane looked this morning. Something about the sun hitting her just right, and that healthy V8 engine under the hood with all of its fluids in the right places, and the faintly musty muscle car smell wafting from the welcome confines of the interior. Some days, everything is just right. Some days, Jane seems to be in just as good of a mood as I am.

I took advantage of that good mood and we set off southward along the Generals Highway in pursuit of giant trees and the seclusion of the forest. Just past the Giant Forest Museum, we hung a quick left towards Crescent Meadows and wound our way up the narrow road into the heart of the sequoia grove. The day’s mission: to see and hike as much of the old growth forest as possible.

Sequoias are only found on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, so they’re not exactly common. They seem to be relicts of an ancient time, giving the impression that the world was a lot bigger then than it is now. These towering red giants stretch hundreds of feet above your head to impossibly high reaches, dominating everything around them as kings of the forest. They are, in a word, majestic.

 

Random guy for scale. 

Our first stop was a brief pause at the famed Auto Log, a downed Sequoia big enough to drive onto! In fact, that’s what it used to be famous for. Before rot due to accelerated wear set in, cars used to be able to drive up onto the tree and park quite safely. It’s closed to vehicles now, unfortunately, but they don’t mind if you go up there on your own two feet.

A British man stopped there while I was wandering around, and informed me, “Well that’s just a proper right lovely kit there, that is!” (or something very close to that). I think he meant Jane. He asked if I’d rev the motor as I pulled away and I obliged, hearing, “GAWWWWWWWWW!!!” as I left, which I interpreted to mean, ‘that sounds amazing’.

Our next stop was one of Sequoia National Park’s most famous attractions: Tunnel Log! This massive log fell across the road leading to Crescent Meadows back in the 30’s and was subsequently tunneled through, since that was easier than chopping the whole thing up and moving it. I lucked into showing up at a time when no one else was there, so I parked Jane and took a few shots before moving on through. I mean, there’s just no way I could resist something like this!

I eventually did reach the Crescent Meadows trailhead and lucked into a parking spot, so I decided to use that as my base of operations for the rest of the morning. A huge network of looped trails crosses the grove between here and the Lodgepole Visitor Center, so I decided I would just go around in circles until I got tired or too lost to do anything but backtrack back to the car. I’m not kidding when I say that there’s a lot of trails in this area, either. Here’s the map I used:

I ended up hiking probably 80% of the trails there trying to see as many sequoias as possible. One of the first things I saw was Tharp’s Log, a downed sequoia that a man (named Tharp, presumably) had turned into a cabin!

Like the horseshoe hinges 

Mostly I just saw a lot of really giant, really red, really cool trees. And I'm not going to walk you through how I turned left at this fork to get to this tree, and right at the next fork to get to the next, so here's a photo dump and if you want to go see them for yourself you'll just have to walk in circles like I did to find them!

Just liked the lighting and the juxtaposition of the fern and the burned stump.

The inside of a Sequoia!

Got a bit toasty but still alive after halfway burning.

An unusual place to put a path... path is 3 feet wide, for reference.

Halfway burned at the bottom but still alive at the top! Sequoias are very resilient.

Now this is an interesting one. This is a partially decomposed Sequoia trunk. The "stakes" poking into the stump are actually the remnants of the branches! Somehow, the wood surrounding them has eroded out first.

This photo was, sadly, taken far after Spring 2017. It appears they are a bit behind schedule.

There's a lot of things I could say about this but I won't say any of them.

A picture of the base of one of the trees with me for scale! I wish the guy taking my photo could have gotten the whole tree in there but I guess he thought that I was interested in people being able to see my face. I'm not. I mostly cared about how huge this tree was.

More I could say about this sign but I won't....

This tree looks totally burned out from this side!

I mean, it is definitely not okay.

But then you walk around to the other side and it looks like a perfectly normal growing tree... very peculiar.

A human-sized Tunnel Log. 

The General Sherman tree - largest tree in the world!! 274 feet tall and 32 feet in diameter. Insane.

The Sentinel.

Before I knew it, late afternoon had rolled around, and with it came thunder and clouds gathering in the distance. I figured that that would be the best time to hike up Moro Rock, a large rock dome rising thousands of feet above the adjacent valley floor. It’s a site well-known for its extreme lightning danger.

Yeah, I might not be the brightest crayon in the box. And I certainly cannot claim ignorance, as I’m aware that lighting can strike miles away from the apparent edge of the storm. All I can say is that you should do as I say, not as I do.

Moro Rock is an exfoliation dome, comparable to Yosemite’s Half Dome though of course not nearly so famous because it hasn’t cracked in half yet. But they’ve both been affected by similar processes. An exfoliation dome is exactly what it sounds like – a convex dome of rock that is constantly shedding its external layers. This behavior is caused by the relief of overburden over a previously deeply-buried rock – usually due to erosion. As the tremendously heavy rock overlying the soon-to-be-dome is lifted, it experiences a reduction in compaction-related stress. This causes the rock to expand outward, developing fractures and joints and causing sheaves of rock to be calved off as it reaches the surface. And eventually, as the surrounding softer rock erodes away, you get a big domed rock sticking up into the sky, periodically throwing bits of itself at the valley floor below.

What a spectacular place to put a stairway and hiking trail!

Looking back down the stairway to the forest floor below, and thinking about my hazardous behavior.

I hiked doubletime up to the top, trying to be mindful of the impending storm, and was rewarded with an incredible view of the surrounding Sierra Nevadas. There really is just something special about this mountain range. I think that I could distinguish it from any other range in the US on sight alone. Something about the gray and green dappled serrated peaks and the shape of the flanks of the valleys and the clouds as they cluster in the sky is just… well, it’s just very Sierra Nevada-ish.

This is what happens when you're too excited to properly focus your camera on a really blue lizard. 

The storm moved a bit closer and I did get smarter, hopping down with plenty of time to spare. Jane and I meandered back up the road towards camp, dilly-dallying some in hopes that the clouds would clear by the time we arrived. I just hate cooking dinner when it’s spitting out.

 

Jane has another admirer taking a picture of her rump.

Jane in the foreground kind of makes these sequoias look smallish, but they were about 40 feet away so... they were not small.

Well, the clouds did clear, and the weather turned beautiful again, so I took an evening hike over to the General Grant tree before cooking dinner. The General Grant tree is actually in Kings Canyon but might as well be a part of Sequoia, because honestly otherwise it’s just confusing. It has the distinction of being the second largest tree in the world – second only to the General Sherman tree, which I saw earlier. Incredible! It’s 268 ft. tall, falling 6 ft. short of the “largest tree in the world” award, but has a larger diameter trunk than the General Sherman.

It is also impossible to fit into one photograph unless you have a mega wide-angle lens, which is frustrating.

Out of the two, I have to say that I liked this one better. Its presence is overwhelming in the oddest way. On the one hand, you know you’re just looking at a tree. And if you’re just looking at a picture, you don’t really realize how large it is. It’s only when you look at it in the grand scheme of things, next to all the other tall trees surrounding it, that you start to realize how huge it truly is. A single branch from this tree is equivalent to an entire standard-sized tree (like a dogwood or a cherry tree or whatever). If that branch fell from that height, it would surely crush anything below it and would likely shake the ground enough to register on a seismograph.

 

Other trees for scale.

That one squiggly branch in particular is... well, extremely large.

After thinking about that for a while, I found myself a bit nervous. Fortunately, the area around the tree is roped off, probably for that reason. But then again, nearly 50% of the forest is made of these sequoias, and probably it would still be pretty devastating if a branch fell off of one of the “small” 200-foot trees. So I went back to my campsite, which was… well, also directly under a sequoia tree. I squinted suspiciously up at the branches while cooking dinner but none of them jumped off the tree to squash me so I figured that maybe I would be okay.

Night fell and still the tree hadn’t attempted to kill me. But I kept an eye cast up there nonetheless. That ended up being extremely fortuitous, as it led to an important realization: I had selected a campsite that had a perfect gap in the forest looking up into the sky just past Jane’s parking spot. And framed within this gap was the Milky Way in all its glory, made even more vibrant by the absence of light from the new moon.

For those of you who have never truly seen a dark night sky – please, make an effort to go see one someday. It can be difficult, getting out away from cities and towns and streetlights and highways and all of the things typically associated with civilization. But there is something very special about looking up into the sky and seeing thousands of stars scattered across the night. An endless series of constellations and stories and memories is attached to each one, and you can feel it. Let yourself really look at them for a while, and they start to weigh on you even as they buoy you up, seemingly pressing you down to the earth at your back while simultaneously pulling you up into the sky. It’s a peculiar feeling, having stars as your only light. And it’s one of the times I feel the most human. Not that I’m not human (I swear), or that I don’t feel connected with the rest of humanity usually, but seeing the stars that people have looked up at for thousands of years connects you in a far deeper way.

I basked in the light of the stars for a while before I remembered the best thing about living in this day and age: the digital camera. More specifically, MY digital camera, which I bought in part because it’s supposed to be exceptionally good for low-light applications. So I propped my camera up on my shoe and a stick, tried not to shake it around too much, and snapped some shots.

I was astounded at what I got back.

I got smart and started using very dim lights to highlight Jane a bit so she could be in the shot too. And that’s how I got a couple of the best, most unique pictures I’ve ever taken of my car.

Don’t think there’s really much more to say to improve the day (or this post). So until next time… Kelly signing out.