Our last major stop on this trip was in Sequoia National Forest.
It’s very difficult to describe the size of these trees and the impressions that they leave behind, and even more difficult to take pictures that truly capture their scale.
It’s really a little bit dangerous, walking the whole time with your head tilted all the way back.
To round off our exciting weekend of wildlife sightings, we also saw a bear. At the end of the day, we were heading to a nice rock outcropping with our fresh local watermelon (bought from a farmer who thought we were from Iowa, because it sounds close enough to Ottawa, and he didn’t know where the latter was anyway) when we heard squealing and saw a group of excited japanese tourists walk back towards us. I thought they had imagined it when they said they had seen a bear, but we decided to investigate anyway.
What do you know – shortly we spotted this little guy, calmly trudging along in a gully between the road and some park buildings.
We got into our car and pulled up in a mini-convoy of cars to get a better look – everyone slowly rolling down along the shoulder in order to keep the bear in the line of camera lenses.
We drove in from the east, which turned out to be the wrong decision for pictures – all the pullouts/vista parking lots were on the wrong side of the highway, so we barely got to stop for any valley/mountains/river views.
The main campsites were full, so we kept driving west until we found one that had some empty spots. After setting up camp, we had just enough time for a quick jaunt up an easy trail near the Tuolomne Meadows.
The light was absolutely gorgeous.
We also had our first two encounters with deer, which around here seem to be completely tame. We tread softly trying to get as close as possible for pictures, but the deer barely batted an ear. I got as close as maybe 10-15 feet to one, and only then did it calmly start moving away.
At two nights, this was the longest we’d stayed anywhere since the wedding. On the second night, we discovered that the dad and son at the next campsite over were originally from Ottawa – this was discovered through a hilarious Kanata/Canada (this will only be funny to people who actually know Ottawa, I think) conversation which I overheard Dan having with the dad.
Rest of the pictures are 
Having been denied a permit for Mount Whitney back in April (because permits for the hike are allocated on a lottery basis, not because they decided that Canadians are too crazy to be allowed on the mountain), I set about trying to find another worthy baggable peak. Mount Whitney distinguishes itself by being the highest peak in the contiguous United States – but afterwards, I found out that it’s actually not that great of a hike. White Mountain Peak, on the other hand, is the third-highest peak in California, is only 250 ft shy of Mt. Whitney, is supposed to be a much better hike (I can’t compare, but it was a lovely hike in its own right) – and it doesn’t require a permit.
The next morning, we started on the long car approach to the trailhead. Both Dan and I agreed that at somewhere around 16 miles, this was probably the longest access road we’ve been on for a hike.
Given the state of the road, it took us over an hour to get to the start of the trail.
The trail itself is actually an old road that goes quite literally to the top of White Mountain Peak. Granted, for about the last 1/3 of it you would need a heavy-duty 4×4 with a good driver, but even so the grading and clearing of such a wide patch along length of the trail definitely made the hike more bearable.
The air at 14,000 ft, however, did nothing to make the hike more bearable. By the time we reached the top, this is the best attempt at an over/under that Dan could muster up.
We also saw lots and lots of marmots and chippies.
Some of them were even sporting man-made jewellery!
Head 
And.. that’s exactly what it is. Kind of creepy. Some of the roads are not paved, but street signs still exist – and even the GPS knows about them. Dan and I wondered whether the fact that a road was paved meant that all the utilities had already been put in, and have been sitting under the desert for the last couple of decades.
That night we camped at a little campground at the edge of the Death Valley park. And what a campground it was – nice and quiet, so dry that we decided to forgo the fly on the tent, and got to enjoy a beautiful view of the Milky Way instead. It also helped that the little restaurant served some delicious local wheat beer at ridiculous prices – 8.50 for a stein holding over a liter of beer!
We spent most of the day driving around Death Valley, hitting all the popular sights:
Badwater,
Artist Drive,
and Zabriskie Point.
The signs reminding you to turn off the air conditioner on longer climbs (because, despite what I would have expected from a “desert”, there were quite a few ups and downs in the Death Valley), and marking locations for refill radiator water were somewhat surreal. All the more interesting given how many large vehicles, including RVs, we saw.
On the way out of the park, we were quite close to stopping back at the restaurant for more of that beer – but given that we had a schedule to keep and if we stopped, we knew we wouldn’t be driving anywhere anytime soon, we decided to press on. Sadly, even the name of that beer will be lost to us, as I forgot to write it down. I thought it was “Sandstorm” something, but google doesn’t seem to come up with anything matching that. Ah well.
Haven’t had your fill yet? Full set of pictures 
