Skip Yosemite and head to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park

Memorial Day weekend is coming up towards the end of May.  With the extra day to the weekend, we’ve been trying to decide what to do.  Provided there are no baseball games we need to attend, we’ve chosen Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park for a camping weekend.  It’s one of our favourite national parks in California, absolutely beautiful but relatively unappreciated, I think.   A lot of tourists head to Yosemite National Park, it’s the most well known in the state and gets absolutely packed during the summer holidays.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon is a lot mellower.  It’s in the southern Sierra Nevada, east of the San Joaquin Valley, about a five-hour drive for us.  As the National Park web site describes:  the two parks testify to nature’s size, beauty, and diversity: Immense mountains, rugged foothills, deep canyons, vast caverns, and the world’s largest trees.

Sequoia is home to the largest trees in the world.  There are plenty of easy trails, a few miles long, taking you around the various single or groups of large trees.  You can drive through a tree that has fallen across the road and walk to see a tree that was made into someone’s home while they were farming the area.

Kings Canyon has a gorgeous river flowing through the bottom of the canyon.  We spent an afternoon by the water’s edge while the boys attempted to fish.  The idea of being quiet, not talking or splashing, was lost on them so they didn’t catch a thing but had great fun.

There are 14 campgrounds scattered throughout the park and I love camping in California.  It never rains, ever! Camping never appealed to me in the UK.  The idea of driving for hours, pitching my tent and then spending the weekend trying to dry out clothes, peering out of the tent to see the rain, just wasn’t my idea of fun.  Camping when you know it’s not going to rain and heading right into the middle of a national park is quite something.  Each campground always has a picnic bench, a fire pit and a nice flat area for your tent.  There are always public loos and perhaps hot showers at a near-by store.

There are black bears in Sequoia and Kings Canyon so everything, absolutely everything, needs to be put into special bear containers, which have handles that the bears can’t open.  On our first camping trip, the boys were convinced we were going to be attacked.  Then, they were disappointed because we didn’t see any bears.  Maybe this time we’ll be more fortunate.

I love nighttime in the park.  The howling of the coyotes, not something I had ever heard before, is frightening and fascinating at the same time but there is some relative safety of the campground.  Although the bears know there could be food, the animals tend to stay clear of the campground due to all the humans around.

There are lots of activities during the summer, arranged by the rangers at the park.  But last time, our campsite was next to a dry riverbed and all the boys wanted to do was play in that and build a dam.  We insisted they see all the sites and drove them all around the park showing them gigantic trees, huge canyons and waterfalls.  Very nice, but can we just go back to the campsite now?  So, we’ve learned this time.  They’ve seen the sites, they just want to play.  And we just want to relax.  The boys can head off the dry river bed for the afternoon and we’re going to rig up a hammock between some trees, climb in and read our books, and a perhaps a nap may be in order.