The next day I drove Kings Highway over to Kings Canyon National Park in hopes of outflanking the smoke. The problem was I had to drive into the heart of the smoke in order to get to the other side. Signs warned of traffic delays due to fire fighting activity and soon I came to a long backup. A park ranger was coming down the line of cars speaking briefly with each driver. She got to me and said she was a fire information ranger explaining what was going on with the fire. Well she never got to another car. She wasn't quite prepared for me; a couple of times she said she had the information I was looking for but had decided not to bring it along. I wanted to make an appointment.
Too soon we were moving again. Lined along the road were several dozen firefighters, all young men as far as I could tell, in formation facing the road and away from the fire that they themselves had set in an effort to create a firebreak. I surmised that they were making sure no spark crossed the road. It was quite a scene. The smoke was intense, at one point reducing my visibility to zero. I came to a complete stop as I don’t like driving when I can’t see what’s on the other side of my windshield. One of the firefighters rapped on my window to wave me on through what proved to be simply a car's length of thick plume.
My relocation strategy was largely successful. The air at Grants Point was much better than it had been at Lodgepole. I went down to see Grant's Tree, the third largest tree in the world, and then on a tree-identification walk with a ranger named Rebecca Rising. Rebecca Rising! She was wonderful. Then I hung around the Visitors Center a bit. It had a lot of John Muir sayings. You’d think he was the only one who ever uttered a sentence about the Sierras. He made a hell of a lot of observations, but his accuracy wasn't that great. I wonder if any one has gone back and tabulated his percentage. After that I walked another loop in the area before driving into Forest Service land for dinner on a real nice granite overlook. I should have camped there but instead I drove on to Meadows Campground in the cold and dark. I hoped no bears were about, because the site had no bear boxes.
It was not an easy night. Cold! I realized I would have to improve my winter sleeping conditions. By now I was going to bed at 9:00PM and waking up at 5:00AM, sunrise still two hours away, and the ground was too cold for me to stay in my sleeping bag. My only early morning strategy was my car, as I don't make fires. This day I got up and packed my tent and drove to a nearby picnic area and ate breakfast in the dark, and then went back to the huge pine-sprinkled granite shelf where the sun came up and it was lovely indeed. The bees came out, the smoke began to rise, and a garbage truck drove by, the first sign of humans I’d seen all morning.
I waited around until 10:00 AM for the showers to open, as I needed to go into town. Fresno in fact, the biggest city since I passed through Reno two months earlier. My main agenda was REI for some winter ground insulation. I also had to conduct some business at a bank, which proved almost surreal compared to the mountains. Of course without the bank and all it signifies the mountains would be maybe too real, as I would not be able to eat except as the bear eats. After these and other long forgotten urban adventures I came back to Grant’s Village and camped at its $20 campground.
Kings Canyon National Park is named after the great canyon of the Kings River. I had seen pictures and read descriptions of Kings Canyon when I was planning my trip, and it was one of the places I was most excited about visiting. But somehow between the greatness of the Giant Sequoias, the hovering pall eliminating vistas, and the usual array of organizational challenges, I'd somehow forgotten about it. I actually set out from Grants Village early Tuesday morning for the drive toward Road's End, noting the distance, the elevation changes, and the sites along the way, without realizing I'd be driving straight down the middle of the canyon.
It was Great! It's a deep canyon, one of the country's deepest - deeper than the Grand Canyon depending on how you measure these things. Having never been to the Grand Canyon I knew I should withhold judgement, but I'd seen plenty of pictures of that too, and I did not expect it to rival Kings Canyon, at least to my tastes.
The road is a steady descent fro Grants Village at 6500' to Roads End is 4600'. It starts with an expansive overview, maybe 3000' above the river, and I got there in time to see the early morning sun generate dramatic light through the smoke plumes. Signs at turnouts explained the fire situation.
Once up, the low sun lit the rocky outcrops a bright orange, and these alone would have been worth a visit. Eventually one turnout held an overlook of the grand confluence between the South Fork and Middle Fork of Kings River, two skinny little ribbons far below, both forks modest creeks this deep in the season. Then down down down, one switchback at a time, straight into the narrow canyon. Steep canyon walls of beautiful rock, a great abyss down to the river, hairpin turns with new mountain views each time, plenty of turnouts for relatively safe closer inspection.
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| Kings Canyon |
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| Kings Canyon Highway |
A spectacular drive. I spent three hours on what would be a 45-minute drive. Good thing I did it early as later in the day many drivers drove the winding curves like they were in a car commercial. They weren't looking at the beautiful road cuts and they weren't so tolerant of those of us who were.
To top it off I found a free campground located near the best part of the entire canyon. It was a bit ratty and it's name - Convict Canyon - didn’t lend confidence, but it was good enough to sleep in, with views out my tent window up to imposing peaks rising above the first thickly-foliated then sparely-beautiful canyon walls. It was a bit of a thrill, really. The campground had five sites and a whole lot of gnats. But then again much of the park had a whole lot of gnats. I was more concerned with bears than I had been recently. People had left food scraps behind - banana peels in my fire grate, for example - so a history of garbage availability could be a magnet. But they wouldn't be as sophisticated as the Yosemite bears, I figured, and would probably stay out of my trunk.
The next morning I drove out to Cedar Grove, which was a dud. The Visitors Center was closed for the season, and as "Villages" go, it isn't one. The river didn’t have much water. I walked to nice waterfalls. A lovely stroll through the gnats at Zumwalt Meadow. I hadn’t had a real hike in ages, and it was bugging me. I hoped to remedy that soon, but the fires made planning problematic.
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| View from Convict Flat Campground |
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| Roaring River Falls |
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| Kings Canyon |
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| South Fork Kings River |
Back above the river at a picnic table in the shade for lunch, a cool breeze made for a lovely midday temperature. Oddly, the gnats didn’t swarm so long as I wasn't moving. While the area did have some deciduous trees, I didn’t see anything changing colors, though scorched conifer needles provided an inadvertent splash of autumn-like color.
The evening was warm and the night stayed warm. I never even got into my sleeping bag, and in the morning I didn't need anything but shirt sleeves. A breeze did pick up and it seemed somewhat ominous. I was thrilled to be there but I wasn’t staying. At this elevation the nights were delightful but the days were still too hot, too buggy. I could come back here later in the fall, when the mountains were getting too cold. Now I had to get over to Mineral King and do some hiking.
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