Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon

Lyle exiting his hideout inside of a large sequoia.

I love this picture of Teah checking out the burn scar of a medium aged sequoia.

The whole family, except me, held inside the burn scar of the Hart Tree.

It's been a month since we were at Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. These two different parks share a boundary and they are managed, pretty much, as one park. We stayed for three nights at the Grant Grove cabins in Kings Canyon near some of the largest Sequoias in the world. The General Grant Tree has the largest girth of any tree, not quite as tall or massive as General Sherman. We had just spent three nights in Yosemite Valley where traffic and sheer number of people make you feel like you're at Disney World. We loved Yosemite, there's a reason so many people go there, but Kings Canyon was perfect for some introvert recovery. It is the place I most hope to go back to. The high sierra mountains are so vast and so beautiful, we barely touched what King's Canyon has to offer. And the Sequoias of both Kings Canyon and Sequoia were as magical as I imagined. A highlight of the whole trip was our hike in the largest grove of sequoias in the world. It's not the Giant Forest that the crowds go to, but a grove half way between the General Grant Grove and the Giant Forest where General Sherman lives. The Redwood Mountain Grove spans a large mountain side with hundreds of giant trees. On our nine mile day-hike we may have seen five people. There is a good bit of climbing, about 1400 feet. There are also creeks and streams throughout. Micah saw a bear! We all took quite time to pray or meditate while in the woods. It was a significant experience to pray in a sequoia forest, with the earth, for the earth and to feel Christ's presence in the earth praying for us.

Micah and Lyle inside the burn scar of the Hart Tree. A massive sequoia in the wilderness of Redwood Mountain. Every large sequoia tells the story of past fires with scars, this one is particularly large.

I used to get called a "tree hugger" when I was a kid, like it was an insult.

Sometimes is was hard to hike because I kept looking up, like Micah in this photo.