July 6 - 8, 2024 - Lafe and Faith's Odyssey

Too Much Heat and Too Many People

The next morning, we awoke at our lovely, secluded pull off and got ready before taking the long, winding road down through Kings Canyon. The road descends thousands of feet to the bottom of the canyon before winding up with the canyon floor toward the road’s end. The canyon is certainly king-sized: mountains soar nearly 8,000 feet above the raging southern fork of the Kings River in some of the steepest terrain in the US. For most of the drive through the canyon, our sunroof provided the best views of the mountains around and above us. We stopped at a small and unimpressive ranger station to see what was going on and saw nothing but warnings about the impending heat of the day (well over 100 in the canyon). However, we did spy a small building labelled “Showers and Laundry”. Oh what a sweet sight: it had been a week since our last shower, and we were down to our last pair of clean underwear. We were so excited that we immediately stopped and ran over to the building. It was closed. Signs on the door said that it was closed for the 2022 season. Considering it is now 2024, I have no expectations that those showers will ever open again. Bummed out, we drove up to the end of the road deeper into the canyon before turning about and heading back up and out. We made our next stop at the primary Kings Canyon visitor center, which was packed with countless tourists from all over the US and the world. We got the obligatory postcard before heading down to the General Grant Tree, one of the largest Giant Sequoia trees in the world. It was extremely impressive, but the day was already hot and the tourists getting more obnoxious, so we made our stay short before getting back onto the small, packed roads towards Sequoia National Park.

Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks adjoin and are managed together as essentially a single park even though they are separate. If you look at a map, there aren’t many roads into or through the parks as they protect huge swaths of the Sierra Nevada mountains. This was a surprise to me, as the maps I use didn’t show the vast wilderness areas as part of the park. In spite of the empty and remote expanses, I would argue that the parks have a high average people/square mile as the few accessible areas were incredibly packed. When we reached the visitor center, a ranger stopped us to say that the only way to see several parts of the park were to catch buses from the visitor center. So, we found a parking spot a ways away and walked back to the visitor center to explore it and figure out where we wanted to take buses to. While at the visitor center, we again spied a sign for showers, and, again, they were closed: 0/2 showers so far. (Dis)satisfied so far, we got in line and caught a bus down to the Giant Forest Museum (supremely mediocre), before catching another bus to the General Sherman Tree (largest living thing) then back to the visitor center. The bus system was convenient but hardly effective in light of the masses of visitors. Here were some other fun things to note:

No law ruled the land: We saw countless tourists break the pervasively posted rules to jump over fences and get pictures standing at the foot of the trees. Standing at the base of the trees damages the shallow roots of the wooden giants and thus should not be done.
No courtesy was honored: The lines for getting onto the buses were more of a few people who had the basic skill of standing in line interspersed between masses of those who did not. The cherry on top was the complete disregard for personal space.
The Sun: It was in the mid-upper 90s the whole day without a breath of wind to cool oneself.

Don’t get me wrong, the park has some really neat trees and mountains to offer, but if you’re not going backpacking or hiking back into the wilderness areas, I’m not sure I can really recommend it. To be honest, our favorite Giant Sequoia was the Grizzly Giant in Yosemite National Park. Once back at our van hours later, we drove an incredibly windy road out of the Sierra back into the Central Valley. It was certainly the windiest road to date, as we hardly exceeded 25 MPH for the hour-plus that it took to get down the mountains. Just before fully out of the mountains, we swam briefly in the Lake Kaweah reservoir to cool off, which wasn’t our greatest decision. It was 116 outside, the water was not cool, and the reservoir was some of the nastiest water I’ve ever seen. So, we made our stop brief before continuing. We paused in Visalia to get some groceries and snacks then zoomed down the road to get to the coast and out of the 110+ heat as fast as we could. We found a little pull off along a windy road in the Southern Coastal Ranges where we made dinner and went to sleep.

In order to beat the heat, we got up early the next day and got moving down the road to Pinnacles National Park. We arrived at Pinnacles around 7 AM, so we were going to see what else the park had to offer before heading to the visitor center. As we approached the visitor center we once again saw a sign: “Restrooms and Shower”. It certainly perked our interest, but we kept our hopes cautiously low. They were open, and they worked! Overjoyed, we were able to fully clean off for the first time in nine days, far too long. After washing ourselves, we washed our dirty undergarments and made some breakfast while waiting for the visitor center to open. We walked in as soon as it was open and asked the rangers what we should do. “Leave. Go to the beach. Seriously.” They weren’t joking, the previous day was 116, and today was supposed to get just as high. The other ranger gave us two options for hikes we should do at the pace of an auctioneer before imploring us to leave immediately. So, we grabbed a couple post cards and drove up the road to a trailhead. We were going to hike 1.5 miles up to a small reservoir via a shaded trail. The trail was lovely, taking us past large rock pinnacles (who’d have thought?), into a pretty forest, and through a small cave formed by collapsed rock spires. The reservoir was small but pretty, and we saw countless dragonflies of numerous species along with some frogs and snakes. As the sun rose and intensified, we made our way back down to our van, stopped briefly at a nature center, and continued out of the park on towards the coast. In spite of the heat and its small size, Pinnacles National Park was certainly our favorite of the three we saw in those two days: there were only a few visitors, the formations were beautiful, and the wildlife plentiful.

We continued on to the coast, making our way to Monterey and basking in the 70-something weather. For lunch, we stopped at the local Costco for free samples and a slice of pizza. Feeling lonely, we made our way to the packed Cannery Row to poke around through the numerous stores and shops. Once we had seen enough, we headed down the coast to Pismo Beach… Well, not quite. Apparently landslides destroyed a chunk of Highway 1 near Lucia, CA, so we were unable to take another drive along the seashore. On the bright side, this made our drive much shorter via the Salinas Valley. Once in Pismo Beach, we poked around through some stores and made our way out onto the pier. We made friends with some of the locals with whom we talked about all sorts of topics. After saying goodbye, we found a spot in town to clandestinely get some shut-eye.

In the morning, we awoke early and headed straight to a cinnamon roll shop we had seen the previous day to snag some day-old rolls. We munched on them and made our way to a coffee shop where I got a drink and Faith ditched me to explore town. Not too long later, I was in a meeting that I had to briefly drop out of to take a call from Faith, who was asking if we could get a painting. I looked at the picture she sent me and gave my stamp of approval. After I was done working, we went over to the store and picked up our first piece of artwork purchased together. The piece was just about as large as we could fit in the van: it either took up most of the bed/couch or occupied both of the front seats. We continued down the road towards our next stop: Solvang, CA, a small Danish themed town. We wanted to spend the next day or two there, so we killed some time at a park tossing a frisbee around before heading down the road a bit and finding a spot on a side road to sleep for the night.