Annabel and Dave's Awesome Adventures: Mariposa Grove

A giant redwood

Another thing which was a bit of a must-see whilst we were in San Francisco were the giant Redwoods. Dave really wanted to see them, I don't know, maybe he feels an affinity to ridiculously tall things. So after 3 days of the city we were in our hire car and off to Yosemite National Park. It was a bit of a drive there, ended up being 4 hours. And the highways are completely insane! The car is definitely king in this land. The highways were packed the whole way out, and that's 10 lanes of dual carriage-way. I gotta say these 10 lanes weren't particularly well-maintained either.

It was so nice to get out to Yosemite, beautiful skies every day, unbelievable views, awesome flora and freaky fauna. What more can you ask for, plus I saw a coyote on the way there. That was cool, so classically American, standing in a field of yellow grass, with rolling hills behind it. That was pretty special.

It was Memorial Day weekend, but luckily we got there before the weekend started and left again on the Saturday, so we were definitely travelling in the right direction going there and coming back. The queue to get in on the Saturday looked painful.

Dave with the National Park "tram"

Dave with a ridiculously big tree

One weird thing was that if you were in the military you got to go in for free, it didn't seem as if that was something particular to Yosemite (perhaps some historical reason), but it seems that case for all National Parks. I couldn't really figure out why that is, I mean the military and the National Parks Service don't seem like natural bedfellows to me. Just look at the surroundings once there's been military intervention somewhere, not generally somewhere on the top of the list as a place of great natural beauty.

One thing I didn't appreciate about Yosemite was how high it is, the carpark was at 1700m, then the highest point, Wawona Vista, was at 2075m, which is not all that much lower than My Kosciuszko. Let's just say the difference in the surroundings was dramatic. On top of Mt Kosciuszko you are very much in alpine territory, and there's definitely a chill to the air. Here the sun was beating down, I was in shorts and there were massive pine trees all around me.

Unusual squirrel in the grove

Redwoods amongst normal pines

I would definitely recommend making the trek to the upper part of the park, as a whole Mariposa Grove is a massively popular place to visit, but there are far fewer people who make it to the upper reaches. And they are mainly the people on the tram, who don't venture far from the road. Though when I say tram I actually mean massive truck. Only in the US would you find a lorry pulling tourists through the nature.

It felt as if the lower part of the park was full of the blockbuster trees, the ones which had names, and I guess these were the famous trees which people hear about when they are children. The upper part, didn't have as many named trees, but I actually think it was nicer. It was cooler for one, and it seemed a bit more lush, less burnt out than the lower down parts.

Away from the "tram" stops there were heaps of redwoods and hardly any people in the upper elevations. And the redwoods really are red, it's not some slight reddish tinge, but a real glow. It's hard to describe, or capture in a photo, but they are mixed in with these other, normal, pine trees and they really stood out. There weren't heaps of them, which made it even better I think, because everywhere you looked you were reminded of the contrast between what had, up to that point, been quite large pine trees, and these monsters.

As a comparison to Kauris, the biggest trees I had seen up to that point, the Kauris have a comparable trunk diameter, but the redwoods are almost twice as tall. And they sure were tall.

Evidence of fire

Walking through the hole in the tree

There was certainly evidence of how people in the past struggled with the concept of conservationism. And you wonder if we have got it right now either, just because of what people were doing in the park only fairly recently. Mariposa Grove became a National Park in 1890 and at the time it seemed like National Parks were early versions of theme parks. People went round cutting holes in a few of the trees, big enough so that waggons or cars could drive through them. Obviously this wasn't so good for the trees and eventually they would fall down.

It is a bit different now, most of the trees have fences round them, keeping the hordes of their shallow root systems. And certainly no more cutting holes in trees.

The giant sequoias need fire in order to grow, they need the lack of competition to get their start when they are seedlings, the adult ones have such thick bark that they are impervious to the fire, whilst the other trees don't really stand a chance. Once the grove came under federal protection they were finding there weren't many redwood seedlings around any more. This was because they had stopped the wildfires, and the normal pines were out-competing the little seedlings. Looking around on our visit though it seems that have either re-started controlled burning, or there was a particularly brutal wildfire through this area recently.

Dave with an over sized pine cone - but not from the redwoods surprisingly

There was an awful lot of wildlife around the park, I guess there are a lot of people to feed off. There were so many squirrels, but they weren't the normal grey squirrels you get in London. I kind of thought there was only one type of squirrel in America, but actually there are heaps. I guess the red squirrel is lucky only one type of squirrel made the trek across the ocean. Whilst we were in California we actually didn't once see the traditional grey squirrel. Mostly we saw ground squirrels, like the one in the photo above, but we also saw Douglas fir squirrels and golden-mantled ground squirrels, which looked almost exactly like chipmunks. They were definitely my favourite. No bears, maybe that's a fortunate thing, but we saw a bunch of birds, including a goshawk, which was my favourite of the birds, just hovering, looking for chipmunk-type squirrels I guess.

The view from Wawona Vista - where we saw the goshawk

The meadow near the museum

Up the top of the park there is this lodge, which is now a bit of a museum, this is the final stop of the tram, so the ranger up there sits around waiting for the tram to arrive. Everyone gets off, and he gives a quick 5 minute spiel about the trees, people pick up a bit of a bark, and handle a pine cone, then it's back on the tram.

They had chosen the location of the lodge well, in perhaps my favourite part of this park, in a grassy meadow, surrounded by massive redwoods. When there wasn't a tram in, it was really peaceful.

I'll leave you with a few more pictures, mainly of trees, so if you don't like trees, the story ends here.

The Bachelor and the Three Graces - all the truly large trees had special names

Me with old grizzly, the most famous tree in the park, I'm sitting about 20m in front of it, 1800 years old, and the second biggest tree in the park, at 64m tall.