Jessie and I just got back from a wonderful weekend of camping in the Sequoia National Forest. The northern end of the forest contains the large, several thousand year old trees that you can drive through. While that definitely remains a must-see destination on our trip list, we actually stayed about 2 hours south of the famous trees, in the Kern River Canyon.
There a lots of pictures if you care to take a look, all of which have been uploaded to our Shutterfly account here.
It was a first time canyon camping experience for the both of us, and there are some obvious truths about canyons that don't really sink in until you're there: (1) the bottom of the canyon gets a lot less sun than the top, (2) therefore the bottom of the canyon is much colder than the top, and (3) because of the air temperature differences canyons are very windy. So with that being said, while the sun rises at it's normal time, it didn't actually get warm until around 11am! Also, it would start to get really cold again around 5pm....so really that only gave us a few hours of the day where we weren't huddled in our tent trying to stay warm. Despite our truncated days, we still made the best of it and had a lot of fun.
Saturday was our first full day, so we decided (being the adventurers we are) to hike/climb/crawl up the side of the mountain to the top of the canyon. We spent a good two hours clawing our way up the side, to then enjoy our lunch (almost) at the top of the mountain. The picture at the top is actually the view from our lunch-site, looking waaaaaay down onto our campsite. Sunday was much less eventful, as we decided to take it easy, read a book, and just enjoy the scenery of the Kern river.
All in all it was a great trip, albeit a bit chilly, and we would definitely go back later.
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