11/63 — Kings Canyon National Park

Very late, but since I’m back into blogging, I believe it’s time to pick up where we left off on my lifelong National Park adventure. Today’s blog is about the second day of Izzy and my 2-day 2021 excursion of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. Today is all about Kings Canyon.

Our journey in this National Park actually started the first day. The General’s Highway, aptly named, runs all the way through the forests and mountains of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. Instead of turning around and driving all the way to the bottom edge of the Sierra Nevadas in Twin Rivers, we decided to leave the other way north, by the Kings Canyon Visitors Center. Before we left, however, we took in the sights of General Grant Grove.

General Grant tree is the second largest sequoia tree in the world. Call me crazy Sequoia fans, maybe it was the sunset, but we adored Kings Canyon National Park’s Sequoias. A much smaller amount just around the visitors center, but some beautiful sights to see nonetheless.

Day 2 of our trip we wanted to get into the canyon the park is named after, which involved 45 minutes of driving, after the visitors center.

The canyon is majestic. Plenty of great stopping points on the way to get in the sights from up-high. However, the amount of things to do was severely limited.

Kings Canyon National Park isn’t the most touristy National Park. That alongside being between 2 of the top 5 most visited national parks just paints the picture of Kings Canyon being ‘the other park.’ The kind rangers were as helpful as they could, and truly loved the park, but we were informed that the park was understaffed and the upkeep was down.

That left Zolaft Meadows (figure out actual spelling) impassable because of broken boardwalks. We got as many pictures as we could, but that meadow is kind of the best views you can get from the bottom of the canyon.

That didn’t stop us from having a good time. We took in all the views of the rushing river, waterfalls, and the pretty foliage (can you believe we were just miles away from sequoias? Such a different landscape so quickly).

We didn’t spend all that much time at Kings. We left somewhere mid-afternoon after a couple of brief hikes and a handful of pull-offs.

If I went back?

At the end of the road, there are 3 or 4 trailheads for massive 15+ mile long trails into the mountains. Would be super fun, but you’d almost have to backpack or do some serious planning ahead of time. We weren’t prepared for that on this trip, but it would be fun to do in the future.