Ockey Family Adventures: King's Canyon National Park Day 2

Another new park!

Day 2 was really long and included a lot of hiking! We woke up early, at around 5:30 when the birds started to sing through the open window. Mark called about 6 o'clock, and the wifi was good enough for us to take turns talking, showering, and eating breakfast. We were really glad to hear that he was doing well in Argentina while we are having fun here.

Our first adventure today was to take a side road out of the park through Sequoia National Forest. This one was narrow and thin and ran past a large lake called Lake Hume. We saw a small buck along the way, but surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of wildlife out in the early morning.

The walk along the lake was nice, and we saw a few new woodpeckers, including a white-headed woodpecker that was high on Dax's list. We also saw a tanager, some stellar's jays, and a lot of squirrels and chipmunks.

Eventually, we continued down to Sequoia National Park where we did a long hike called Tokopah Falls. This was one of our longest hikes of the trip at nearly 4 miles. The waterfall was really more of a long cascade down into the canyon. It was really roaring, but we couldn't get too close without a scramble, and we were plenty tired.

The buck was a handsome guy.

Lake Hume is lovely. Dax is always looking for fish.

We liked the end of the lake with this fun bridge and waterfall.

We all had fun exploring on these rocks.

It was a great stop.

This woodpecker is so cool.

Stellar's Jay is one of our favorite birds.

We ate lunch in the parking lot at the Visitor Center of Sequoia, and then the boys turned in their Junior Ranger booklets (they feel a little old for it, but they are still good sports). Then we took a second drive through the wilderness out to Big Meadow. The idea was to see a fire lookout that sits high on a rock dome. Unfortunately, the road was pretty bad, and we hadn't known it wasn't paved. It was rutted and rocky and climbing steeply. We got within a half mile of the lookout before turning around and heading back down the mountain.

The wildflowers were beautiful all throughout the park.

Such a pretty place.

The tall towering cliffs are awesome.

So many boulders to climb over.

We loved walking right through them.

This is the bottom part of the waterfall.

Dad had a crazy idea that after all that hiking we needed to drive, so he drove to another off-road adventure called Chicago Stump. This one was from a massive tree cut down for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. There were a bunch of other stumps around, too. It's hard to believe how wantonly these trees were cut down shortly after their discovery.

Such cute Junior Rangers.

The Chicago stump was a short, but great stop.

The stump is quite large.

After a brief rest back in the lodge, we grabbed dinner at the same restaurant in Grant Grove Village. Then we had two more adventures. The first was a walk around the North Loop. This was an absolutely beautiful hike through a massive grove of sequoias. Unfortunately, it was pretty long and a little too steep after all the hiking we'd done. We were glad the final stop was at a roadside exhibit called the Big Stump.

Back at our favorite restaurant.

We burned ourselves out on all the trails tonight.

It is amazing that these huge trees grow from such small pinecones.

The problem was, it didn't turn out to be a roadside exhibit. It was actually a trail that went down about a mile through a lot of big stumps to a really big stump called Mark Twain's Stump. You could climb right up on this one like a stage, and three deer came out to watch our performance as Seth danced around on the massive slab. Sadly, we had to climb back up and out to Big Stump Trailhead. We were pretty wiped by the time we did that, and we stumbled back to the lodge. It had been a really long day!