2012/05 Western USA trip - Travel to Kings Canyon |
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Thursday May 31st
We were moving on to Kings Canyon, another national park, still in the Sierra Nevada, but about 200 miles south. There are no reservations for the campsites in the canyon so we hoped to arrive early enough to get one.
We left El Portal, still following the Merced River. We soon came to where the road had been buried by a landslide and replaced by a couple of temporary bridges which gave us a detour along what may have been an earlier road. With the Little Guy in tow we barely made the turns onto the bridges.
From there we had a twisty country road until we joined CA 49, the Gold Rush Highway, numbered and named after the 1849 gold strike in 
the area. We left the hills behind and entered the San Joaquim Valley, surrounded by heavy traffic and irrigated orchards. We turned east at Fresno and began the climb towards Kings Canyon. We stopped for shopping at Reedley and found a great fruit stand further along the road for peaches and nectarines and other good stuff. As you can see, it was a “wash your own” store. For the first time on the trip the weather was uncomfortably hot.
We’d been looking at the map and getting totally confused by all the bits of park; Kings Canyon national has two parts, as does the Sequoia park and they are surrounded by bits of Sequoia national forest and Giant Sequoia national monument. However, it’s all beautiful and our pass gave us admission to all the bits, so it didn’t cause us any problems.
We were going to drive directly to the campground and secure a campsite, ignoring all the viewpoints along the way. This was difficult as the 
canyon is indeed spectacular, dropping nearly a mile from the entrance station. Early on we spotted a beautiful yucca, ablaze with white blossoms, and then we saw a few and then hundreds all over the canyon wall. Fortunately there was little traffic as the road is steep and narrow, with a long drop to the canyon floor.
As t turned out, we needn’t have worried, as there was plenty of room in the campgrounds. I’d picked the one that was closest to the main building with its showers and laundry, but after setting up in the ideal campsite we found out that the bridge over the Kings River was being replaced and we’d have to drive there anyway! But we were just happy to be in a quiet site early enough to have a fire and cook our bratwurst.