We were back in Sequoia National Park today for another dose of absurdly large trees. The smog we saw yesterday was mostly gone today, so it was nice to see the trees and other sights against a backdrop of mountains and sky instead of a vague white haze.

Visiting the park on a Monday was a completely different experience versus our trip yesterday (which fell on a weekend). It was virtually empty—I think we saw a total of about twelve people all day. Which was a nice change from yesterday, when we got to listen to a five-year-old kid with his family follow us for about a half mile, loudly exclaiming how much fun he was having “pooping in all of the outhouses” that he came across.

We spent the morning walking through the Giant Forest area of the park, finding quite a few trees to pose with (and in!). There were a lot of active bear warnings posted, but we didn’t encounter any—in fact we saw very little wildlife in the park, other than a single lonely tarantula crossing the road last night, and an owl tonight.

We’d had our fill of giant trees by early afternoon, so we decided to do the Tokopah Falls Trail—a 5 mile relatively flat hike to the tallest waterfall in the park. The waterfall itself wasn’t much more than a trickle, but the walk to the falls was along a spectacularly scenic river, and we ended up stopping every few hundred feet to explore its rocky banks. It ended up being one of the more enjoyable short hikes of our trip.

Tomorrow we’re headed up to King’s Canyon National Park, and then from there to an Airbnb condo we rented outside of Yosemite.

Pictures from today (click for larger versions):

Lori driving through Tunnel Log.

Lori in Chimney Tree. The entire inside of the tree is hollow!

On the Tokopah Falls trail.

We actually took a photo of the two of us together! Tokopah Falls is in the background.

We stopped at the side of the road on the way out of the park for this sunset.