Monday, August 14, 2023
My wife and I left San Diego this morning for the Azalea campsite in Kings Canyon National Park. We drove north on I-805, which joins I-5 just north of UCSD, to Tejon Pass at 4,183 ft., which is called by Californians "the grapevine". The pass is through the Tehachapi Mountains on the other side of L.A. (There is a town called Grapevine located there, or at least there is a sign for it, which I noticed for the first time on this trip.) There is really nothing much to note about driving through L.A. except that I wanted to drive through it without stopping. After getting through L.A. without much traffic, we stopped at Gorman to get gas, which is a small town in the pass and is located south of Bakersfield. We got on 99 north, just south of Bakersfield. Instead of getting on 65 to Porterville, which would have taken us directly to the Sequoia National Forest on Generals Highway, we veered northwest towards Tulare and then Fresno. It was a straight shot northwest through Tulare to 180. On 180 we went due east through Squaw Valley. It was about a thirty mile winding drive before we arrived at our campsite at 6,600 ft in the Sierras. At a certain point 180 becomes 198 as it approaches Azalea from the north. However, when we left on the third day, we got on 180 south of Grant Grove and Azalea and went past the Big Stump entrance of the park after we left the parking lot of Grant Grove Village towards Fresno instead of taking Generals Highway south through Sequoia Kings Canyon Wilderness, which is south of Kings Canyon.
Azalea is located just south of General Grant Grove and west of the Great Western Divide and south of Silliman Crest. It is in the western part of Kings Canyon National Park, which is in two separate sections because Giant Sequoia National Monument and Jennie Lakes Wilderness/Sequoia National Forest divide it into two parts. Sequoia Kings Canyon Wilderness is directly south of Kings Canyon National Park.
Azalea has 110 campsites and our campsite was number 69,
which I had reserved online and paid $56 for two nights. At the entrance of Kings Canyon Park I paid $20 instead of the $35 parking fee. I got the senior citizens' annual pass. There was no indication that our site had been reserved, at least the short post stuck in the ground with the number 69 on it at the site had nothing attached to it. It seemed to me that anybody could have taken the spot, since it was first come, first serve. The morning of our last day at our campsite I saw a park official who got out of a white pickup. She had a clipboard and checked a nearby campsite's food locker, or bear box, I guess to see if any food had been left by the previous campers. Did she have the list of reserved campsites?
Azalea is near Grant Grove Village, which is where a market, post office, lodge, restaurant, gift shop, and visitor center are located.
Grant Grove is in the northern section of Kings Canyon National Park, which is on the western border of Giant Sequoia National Monument. Grant Grove is where the giant sequoia tree named after General Ulysses S. Grant is located. To find the General Grant Tree, you follow the trail whose head is opposite the visitor center in Grant Grove Village. You just have to cross the road and the trailhead is there.
We stayed two nights at the campsite, which was on a slight incline. Mary and I had to scoot ourselves up the slope in our sleeping bags whenever we found ourselves with our feet touching the inside of the tent. I didn't want to sleep with my feet pointing up the slope, nor Mary, because I didn't want the blood to be going to my head.
The sequoias towered overhead and were spaced widely apart at our campsite.
There was a creek maybe 50 yards away. However, it was far enough away that we couldn't hear it because there was a slope going up from our campsite before it plunged down to the creek. We had two neighboring campsites which were occupied when we arrived. At least two young white guys and maybe another guy were next to our campsite, but they were far enough away to make our campsite spacious. I had rented a bear vault, a bear-proof cannister, from REI outfitters but didn't need it, as there was a food locker available at each site. The food locker was a wrought iron box painted a dark brown with a double door and a bear-proof latch. I had to show my wife how to open it. There was no sound of a rummaging bear or raccoon the two nights we were there.
Sequoias keep the forest floor free from vegetation, apparently because the tannic acid in its roots keep undergrowth from growing. (They are like walnut trees in this respect. Walnut trees have juglone, which is a toxic chemical for humans and plants.) Therefore, there were few mosquitos, though they attacked us while my wife and I were pitching the tent until we applied the mosquito repellent spray. We brought our family tent, as the two-person tent is rather cramped for space and needless to say you can't stand up in it as you can in the family tent. There were not a few sequoia cones on the ground and Sugar Pine cones, too. I noticed there was a lot of dead pine wood on the ground, which was useful for tinder. Whole trees with broken trunks lay on the ground like broken marble columns of an ancient Greek temple.
Each campsite had a grill low to the ground and a metal ring to serve as a barrier for the fire. There was a small open dumpster for ashes next to the toilets with a shovel provided and two pails to carry the ashes.
The next morning we used our new stove with butane fuel to boil water to make oatmeal. I forgot to bring the cast iron skillet, so we didn't fry the eggs we had brought. There is always something you forget to bring. Nor did I bring a tea kettle to boil water in. Fortunately, I brought a Boy scout style mess kit, whose saucepan served as kettle. Also, we brought a brand new cast iron Dutch oven that I got at Walmart, but we didn't even use it except to boil water in.
After storing our food in the locker we drove to Grant Grove Village to shop for food for dinner. In the small store we got some already prepared packaged food to heat up later in the little mess kit aluminum skillet.
The trail head for the Sunset Loop Trail that leads to the giant sequoia tree named after General Ulysses S. Grant is just across the street (Highway 180) from the visitor center. We saw a number of giant sequoias, which is designated in the guide as a giant sequoia grove. We must have seen what the guide calls the "Happy Family" ("five stately sequoias") because there were a number of giant sequoias standing together. (This reminds me of a time when one of my brothers and I did some control crew work during a forest fire in northern Idaho in the summer of 1979. We met a guy there who claimed he could identify families of trees because of the long time he spent working in the forest.) Also, we must have seen the Michigan Tree because I remember seeing a "fallen sequoia reposing in broken sections beside the trail," as it was described in the guidebook.
But, we didn't take the side trip to Viola Falls. So much for not consulting my guide book before setting out from our campsite. It's a good guidebook (
Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks by Mike White), though it wrongly said Grant Grove Village had public showers. Much to Mary's chagrin, she was told that there were no public showers in the whole park.
The couple next to our campsite, at number 71, left the morning of the following day. They were leaving after four days of camping there. The guy gave us two pieces of fresh firewood before they left. I built a fire that night, though we really didn't need one. We were cooking everything on the stove. The day before, when we arrived, I had tried to chop some dead wood with my hatchet but found it ineffective for the job. An axe was what I needed--the long handle gives the swing more force to cut and chop the wood. However, there was enough wood for kindling lying on the ground as well as plenty of dry pine needles and pine cones. The small branches of the large pine trunk on the ground were almost rubbery when bent and even friable. To break one in two was dangerous. Mary slipped and fell on her butt because she tried to snap a branch in two, using her foot to brace it on the ground. Fortunately she wasn't hurt and laughed it off. I used lint from our clothes dryer at home as tinder, as recommended by a YouTube video I watched about the essential items to bring for camping. It ignited quickly when I lit it with a match.
There is a branch off the Sunset Trail Loop not far from the trailhead, which goes southeast and is part of the Azalea Trail, which is east of the Sunset Loop and is a 4.6 mile loop. The Sunset Loop is 5.75 miles. The Azalea campsite is partly inside the Sunset Loop, which passes right through it northwest of Grant Grove Village. Mary and I went north on the trail from the Kings Canyon Highway where the trail cuts through. If we had gone south we probably would have seen signs for Ella and Viola Falls, but we didn't go that far along the trail; we didn't do the whole loop. I remember passing Lion Meadow twice because we turned back. (Notice that in the photo the sign says 'Grant Tree' and 'Lion Meadow' with arrows pointing upward.)
Therefore, we did about half the northern part of the loop.
I was wearing a pair of binoculars and noticed a man with a pair, also. I asked him if he was birdwatching, but he smiled sheepishly and said that he wasn't; that he had brought binoculars in case he saw something. I kind of laughed, sensing that he was a city person and had not the foggiest notion of what birdwatching entailed. I told him there was not a lot of activity, it wasn't the right time of day for birds to be active, as it was in the late morning. Later, near Lion Meadow I observed a Brown Creeper scooting up the trunk of a tree and observed and heard a few Mountain Chickadees moving and calling in the foliage. As the guidebook states, the meadow is indeed verdant, though it is not wide and is a long ellipse in shape, as its verdure is kept green by Big Tree Creek, which cannot be seen because of the long grass. I wonder if it is considered what is called a swale, where the water flows in a trench, because if indeed Big Tree Creek feeds into the meadow, as is shown in the guidebook, there was no evidence of a creek.
At the General Grant Grove near Lion Meadow there were quite a few tourists, mainly French and Italian. I quipped in French, as Mary and I passed a group of tourists on the trail, that there were a lot of French--il y en a beaucoup de français. Immediately a woman turned her head and smiled at me.
We ate at the restaurant at Grant Grove Village and then drove back to our campsite. That evening "the yeti" and his blonde girlfriend arrived in a diminutive white van and pitched a tent at site number 70, next to ours. I call him "the yeti" because he was tall and hairy with long curly hair, though he was thin, unlike a real yeti, or sasquatch.
We greeted each other and he remarked that the campsite was "a primo location." I noticed that his blonde girlfriend, who always had a bemused smile on her face, pitched their small tent by herself. At one point, their tent lifted off the ground from a breeze before she put the stakes in the ground. They did not strike me as serious campers. I suspected that they were camping just to get some nookie in the sack that night. We didn't hear a peep out of them the whole night, or at least until we fell asleep. The food lockers really serve their purpose, for I heard no sounds of foraging critters or black bears during the night. According to the woman at REI Outfitters from whom I rented a bear vault, or bear-proof cannister,
black bears are smart enough to even get food from a bag slung high up between two trees, as the Boy Scout guide I have recommends. She also told me to wipe peanut butter off my mouth, as if to say that bears have a keen sense of smell. (This reminds me of a story when I went camping with my oldest brother who lives in Colorado, where we went camping shortly after I arrived in California. After we pitched the tent I decided to open a can of sardines much to my brother's dismay. He reprimanded me immediately, "Are you nuts? A bear can smell those sardines a mile away!" I hurriedly ate all the sardines, drank the olive oil and washed the can in the nearby running stream. You don't fool around with a bear nor with a Vietnam vet who was a buck sergeant in the army.) In the end I didn't need the bear vault because the food locker was spacious enough to hold all our food.
My wife and I packed our equipment and loaded my pick-up truck on the second morning of our camping trip in the Sierras. I stirred the ashes of the camp fire we had made the night before and disposed of them in the dumpster for ashes with one of the pails and shovel provided for that purpose. We drove to Grant Grove Village to have breakfast. Then we got on Route 180 to return to San Diego via Fresno:
Kenneth Rexroth's poems and writings about the Sierras inspired me to camp in Kings Canyon National Park, the area near which Rexroth explored and spent many days, weeks and months throughout the course of his life in the days when you carried, as Rexroth did, a ninety pound backpack and even had a burro to carry your equipment into the backcountry. He was a prominent American poet, especially in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. He is known as a precursor of the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen et al.
In the spirit of "the yeti" and his partner, here is a poem by Rexroth, an example of his beautiful nature and love poems. It is from a section in INVERSELY, AS THE SQUARE OF THEIR DISTANCES APART from "The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944)". Rexroth said he did his best writing when he was camping in the Sierras. Otherwise, he lived in San Francisco.
At the wood's edge in the moonlight
We dropped our clothes and stood naked,
Swaying, shadow mottled, enclosed
In each other and together
Closed in the night. We did not hear
The whip-poor-will, nor the aspen's
Whisper; the owl flew silently
Or cried out loud, we did not know.
We could not hear beyond the heart.
We could not see the moving dark
And light, the stars that stood or moved,
The stars that fell. Did they all fall
We had not known. We were falling
Like meteors, dark through black cold
Toward each other, and then compact,
Blazing through air into the earth.
Labels: Camping
