We returned to Sequoia NP today to spend more time exploring the park. We stopped at the visitor center at the south entrance to collect our 57th Passport Stamp, explore the limited exhibits and talk with the ranger about hiking options. There is no park movie for Sequoia, which being one of the premier parks, is very surprising. The exhibits were pretty disappointing as well. We left the visitor center and stopped at Hospital Rock to see the pictoglyphs. There was a very limited number of pictoglyphs that are fading and hard to determine what many are. We then drove up the twisty Generals Highway to just before the Forrest Museum, where we turned down a narrow road to see the key sites we had decided on. Our first stop was at Auto Log where there is a very old fallen sequoia trunk that the CCC piled dir on top of and carved the top of the log flat so cars in the 1930s could drive for a hundred feet on the log (its no longer allowed). The next stop was at Auto Tunnel, where a fallen sequoia trunk had a tunnel carved through it by the CCC and the road run through it. It was tall and wide enough for us to drive the Behemoth through it. We then went to the end of the road where we hiked out to Tharp’s Log (2.7 miles, 240 feet of elevation gain, 695 calorie burned), which is another fallen Sequoia trunk that was used by a settler in the early 1900s as a cabin. We then continued on around Crescent Meadow before making it back to the Behemoth. Along the way was hundreds of old sequoia trees with at least a hundred of them over 1000 years old. They are magnificent! We then headed down to Moro Rock where we climbed the 350 stairs to the top of Moro Rock, another CCC project with stairs chiseled into the rock. With steep drop on either side, Moro Rock protrudes out into the valley and provides magnificent views of the High Sierra Mountains to the east. The haze from the fires around Los Angles was even worse today than yesterday. You could actually smell the smoke today.
Then it was back down the twisty Generals Highway to get back to the Wanderer.
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| Entrance Sign for South Entrance |
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| Pictoglyphs on Hospital Rock |
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| The Behemoth going through Tunnel Log |
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| Tharp's Log |
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| Looking up Chimney Stump |
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| Stairs limbing up Moro Rock |
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| Leslie on top of Moro Rock |
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| High Sierra Mountains |
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