21.7. - Seqoia - The Giant Forest

Since Markus and Erik are playing beautifully in the back of the camper, I (Klaus) will write the next blog, too.
As I had mentioned, we got a pretty good campground very close to Seqoia, so in the morning, when we got up, we went straight to the visitor center to confirm the hiking route I had already planned in my mind anyhow. Just to make sure.
So what we did was leave the camper at the visitor center and take the shuttly to the trailhead for the General Sherman tree. The largest tree when it comes to pure mass. We walked around all the trails there, met a few Austrians and tons of other people. Then we took off to the Congress trail, which took us through one grove after the other. An incredible amount of Seqoia. So many that, of course, Markus got fed up again with so many redwood trees. But we managed to keep him motivated by giving him calculation exercises and data to process.
My personal favorite along the way was the founders grove, a tiny little grove with a dozen redwoods. Just incredible. And it kept on going that way. Eventually, we got to Crescent Meadow, where we had a short break to eat our clif bars and chocolate chip cookies which we had brought along.
The plan was now to take the shuttle bus to Moro Rock. The plan actually worked out, but took an hour longer than we thought. In the end, we managed to get to Moro Rock. We hiked up, a very steep path along very poorly secured handrails. In the EU, that would have definitely been shut down for lack of security. But in the US, strangely enough, this was OK. Any, being "experienced alpinists", we arrived at the top, enjoyed the view, and hiked back down...Then we took the shuttle bus again to take us back to the camper. Another hour. Hm, we should have just hiked back, whatever...
Since it then was 4:30 instead of 2:30 as I had planned (not knowing the shuttle buses take longer than just walking), we stopped at the very first rest area and had "lunch", a few sandwiches "american style", as Markus calls it. That means 5 slices of turkey breast, another 5 of roast beef, and 5 of salami, topped by lettuce, tomatoes, onions and relish. Yummie!
Now comes the interesting part. Since the road from General Sherman to Three Rivers was "not advised" for vehicles over 22 ft, we decided to go back to the Grant Grove and look for a campground. We went down highway 245, which turned out to be a big, big mistake. The 20 miles to the campground took us over 2 hours, because the highway was very, very, very windy. Definitely more windy than the (5 mile long) road that would have taken us there directly could have ever been. So we were a little bit fed up when we arrived at the campground at Three Rivers, and on top of it is was really, really hot. We had to postpone the laundry to the next day, and went to bed with the air condition on all night. (Which we needed anyhow, because there were 2 parties going on in the campground).