Sequoia National Park

I laughed when we walked into the Giant Forest. Not a polite laugh — a startled, involuntary one, the kind that comes out when your brain refuses to accept what your eyes are reporting. The trunks were simply too wide. Lia put her hand flat against the cinnamon-red bark of one and it looked like she was touching the side of a building. We had driven up the switchbacking road that morning from the hot brown foothills, ears popping, and stepped out into a cathedral of trees so old that some were already ancient when Rome was young. I am not a religious man but I lowered my voice without meaning to.

The General Sherman Tree

You go to see the General Sherman first because everyone does, and because it is, by volume, the largest single tree on the planet. There’s a paved path down to it, a little viewing area, a fence, and a modest sign — all of which feel almost comic next to the thing itself. It doesn’t taper the way trees are supposed to. It goes up and up and stays fat the whole way, a rust-red column disappearing into the canopy. Lia and I tried to take a photo that captured it and gave up; there is no angle. A ranger nearby told a family it weighs more than a fully loaded jumbo jet, and everyone went quiet doing the math. We stood there far longer than the tree needed us to.

Climbing Moro Rock

For a change of scale we climbed Moro Rock, a great granite dome with a stairway of some four hundred steps carved and bolted into its flank. It is not for anyone shaky about heights — the railing is all that stands between you and a very long drop — but the reward at the top is the whole Great Western Divide laid out in ragged blue-white ranks across the horizon. We caught our breath at the summit while a cold wind came up off the peaks and a raven rode it, showing off. Below us the green sea of the forest rolled away and you could just make out the crowns of the big sequoias poking above the rest. Lia gripped my sleeve on the way down. So did I, honestly.

Walking through Tunnel Log

There’s a fallen sequoia on the road with a hole cut through it big enough to drive a car through — Tunnel Log — and it is exactly the kind of gloriously silly thing you can’t resist. We didn’t drive through; we walked, and stood in the middle of the trunk looking up at the growth rings, thousands of them, a whole timeline of drought and fire and good years pressed into wood. What got me was the fire scars. These trees don’t just survive fire, they need it — the heat opens their cones. Lia said there was a lesson in that and I told her not to make it a metaphor, and then we both did anyway, quietly, walking back to the car through the ferns.

Getting There

Sequoia sits in California’s southern Sierra Nevada and is most easily reached by car from Visalia or Fresno, each roughly an hour to the entrance, with Fresno and the smaller Visalia airports being the nearest to fly into. The Generals Highway climbs steeply and twists hard, so take it slow and check that RVs and trailers are allowed on your stretch. The park pairs naturally with neighbouring Kings Canyon — they share a boundary and are managed together. Summer brings crowds and warm days in the Giant Forest; winter can close roads and require chains. There’s lodging at Wuksachi inside the park, or cheaper beds down in the foothill towns.