Giant trees

We set off early today on the shuttle bus to Sequoia National Park. The roads are not really suitable for RVs and there are road works. We twisted and turned up the Sierra Nevada mountains for over an hour pleased that someone else was driving. The road climbs up to 2000m and the views were fantastic. The bus took us to the Giant Forest Museum where the first Sequoia you see is the Sentinel. It looks huge but the information said it was only average. We went to the General Sherman tree which is the largest tree in the world, measured by volume. It is 83m tall, 11m diameter at its base and is over 2000 years old. Giant Sequoias are unique to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains and need fire to open the cones so they can reproduce, which is why fires in the area are contained but not extinguished. The bark of the tree is fire resistant so although you can see burn marks on some trees they are still growing. You can get up close to many of the trees but photos don’t

do them justice as you can’t portray how huge they are. Scott, Lola and Evie saw a bear and three cubs monitored by a Ranger on one of the trails they walked on but they were too far away to get a photo. Our journey back down on the shuttle bus was delayed when part way through the roadworks the traffic came to a standstill. A big RV was too slow going down, the lights changed and traffic started coming up. Nobody could move anywhere. The road was closed off and after some careful manoeuvring of cars the situation was solved after forty minutes. It meant we were late setting off to our next campground near Yosemite so was late when we arrived.