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Southwest Journey: Day 9 – Kings Canyon Nationwide Park
Regardless of the nasty climate, we loved our first Sequoia expertise, however we had been keen to go away the upper altitude to take pleasure in dryer, hotter climate.
The Sequoia and Kings Canyon Nationwide Parks are positioned in shut proximity to at least one one other, which makes it a standard follow to go to each parks throughout the identical journey. That was precisely our plan.
The drive from Sequoia to Kings Canyon is lower than 100 km, however it took us three hours to finish due to the thick fog and nil visibility that made driving the slim, mountain roads extraordinarily tough and ugly.
Though the drive was treacherous, we weren’t fearful concerning the climate as a result of I knew that Kings Canyon is at a a lot decrease altitude. We had been sure it could be drier and far more nice there.
However we had another urgent concern to resolve. As soon as once more, we didn’t have a spot to camp in a single day. The day we devoted to exploring Kings Canyon was the primary day of Memorial Weekend in the USA, which meant all of the campgrounds had been booked months upfront. Even campsites greater within the mountains the place rain and chilly climate made it hardly usable and almost certainly unenjoyable had been packed.
Plus, since you can not camp in non-designated areas in any Nationwide Park, we had very restricted choices for wild tenting between the 2 parks.
Ultimately, the web neighborhood helped us discover a spot for the evening. Visiting freecampsites.internet, I discovered references to a free campground positioned close to the doorway of Kings Canyon Nationwide Park. It’s positioned simply off the aspect of the highway on the seashore of the Kings Canyon River. Since you can not ebook the campground on-line, only a few folks learn about it.
After we entered the campground round midday, we couldn’t imagine our eyes—all eight campsites had been vacant, and the campground was fully empty. We grabbed probably the most secluded spot and drove via Kings Canyon and hiked within the park for the remainder of the day.
Bear Scare
It was not our first go to to the Sierra Mountains, so we knew concerning the excessive likelihood of encountering bears within the mountains. Usually, bears don’t pose a hazard to folks because the solely cause they often strategy vacationers is to steal meals. All hikers and campers should pay attention to the difficulty and know tips on how to reduce the chance of a harmful encounter by correctly storing their meals, particularly at evening.
Apparently, Kings Canyon has a excessive focus of bears as a result of now we have by no means earlier than seen such preventative measures. There are indicators posted all over the place with directions on tips on how to cope with meals whereas tenting and climbing. The final rule is that you simply can not go away any meals unsupervised additional than an arm’s size or it could possibly be stolen by bears.
While you enter the park, park attendants give all guests a brief lecture on bears. Each campground is provided with steel meals packing containers and a compulsory rule that campers retailer their meals within the packing containers each evening. Almost all of the meals packing containers are deformed by deep scratches made by the bears foraging and attempting to claw their approach into the packing containers for meals.
You can even hire odor resistant meals canisters that make it potential to hike within the canyon with out attracting bears or different animals.
The issue was that our campground didn’t have any steel meals packing containers nor had been there any park attendants to ask if the campsite was positioned in a harmful space.
We saved our meals in our cooler and drug it 50 meters away from the campsite. We additionally determined to sleep within the automobile.
Nothing occurred that evening and we discovered our meals intact the following morning.
We solely had someday to discover Kings Canyon, which was sufficient to fall in love with the park. Now, it’s undoubtedly on our to do checklist for our subsequent journey. The plan is to spend three to 4 days climbing within the mountains. We actually plan on bringing scent-proof backpacks for a good safer hike.
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