from before

The restaurant and bar are set up along the creek. Actually it isn’t a creek and I’ll look up the story later.

Creekside entertainment…

The restaurant looked perfectly fine, probably a date-night spot for the town but I decided to have some food and a glass of wine in the bar as there seemed to be more of a lively vibe and a football game on tv.

I asked for the food and a glass of red wine. The bartender got out some punky weird glass, not the nice red wine glass like the guy sitting next to me had. I said, oh, I’ll have the real red wine glass. The bartender said, oh, we use those for our regulars. I said, oh, my name is Penny, how about if you pretend you know me and give me a real red wine glass. He said, oh, ok, fine, here ya go.

From that moment I was a regular, my real red wine glass was always full and for the next hour I got to eavesdrop on life in Three Rivers.

This is the Marlboro Man.

The personable back bar.

No one, not even a wild boy can resist a kitten.

This is 7am Saturday morning and a few minutes later Dad was out with some tempting treat.

The restaurant didn’t open until 9 but they did have a coffee maker in the room. It was the Worst coffee I can Ever remember drinking and I drank one cup there and took two more along in the car.

I’m now three feet from the ticket booth.

And a bit more. I have been here countless times before and still I am already entirely ga-ga. Isn’t that Moro Rock out there?

Because I can.

It’s like I brought her along as a model.

She was with a three-car party of Spanish speakers from Great-Grandma to babes in arms. As we huffed our way up the stairs (notice I arrived second…) I got to listen to many conversations between them all.

You could guess how it worked – the older ones spoke only in Spanish and were answered in Spanish, the middle aged parents sprinkled some English words in when speaking to the younger ones (like they couldn’t remember a Spanish equivalent), the teens sprinkled some Spanish words in when they were talking to each other and the ones under teenage basically spoke English except to the very oldest.

It was a perfect small novella in cultural acquisition.

Wow. The Great Western Divide.

I like the look of the ridge but the glare is a pain.

There was a pretty trail leading off from the starting point at Moro Rock and it looked easy so I tried it.

Keep both?

Here is one of the cutie boys from the big group. We were playing hide and seek as we trudged up Moro Rock and this is a got’tcha picture from the parking lot.

The trees in this group are ‘not that big’ in comparison to the really big guys but it’s cool that you can get back far enough to take their headless picture.

We know how big these giant sequoias get and here are some facts: they grow naturally only on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada (the trees on the coast are redwoods), the General Sherman is between 2300 and 2700 years old and each year adds enough wood to make a 60-foot tree of usual proportions, (more to come…)

I took a lovely stroll out to Crescent Meadow, John Muir’s ‘Gem of the Sierra’. This walk is about point four miles from the parking lot, shouting distance. But the wildflowers are gone, the sun is overhead and there isn’t much to say about standing here. So I back up three steps, back to the path, turn my head and…

The current Park Superintendent gave the opening words at the Remembering 1903 ceremony. This poor fellow was trying to speak extemporaneously but he couldn’t settle on naming vocabulary and was so uncomfortable he made me squirm. He said African-American and Afro-American, black people and people of black descent and descendants of black people. It was obvious he cared about the parks and this event so I was thinking he might have been better off with notes for his talk since he was not fluent in the topic.

The keynote speaker came on and he made me uncomfortable too. He was on about slavery and lynching and discrimination. We just want this to be over like we want the Israelis and the Palestinians to quit it and we want the Africans to lay off each other and we want everyone to Just Get Along.

The crowd was gathered as in the previous picture but of course they were late in getting started. An older most formal looking gentleman and his even more formal looking wife (straight back, square shoulders, tailored clothes) were sitting at the end of the second row.

The man had a full kit of lovingly tended forty year old Nikon camera equipment. He was shy but I watched him gather himself up tall and respectfully approach this man who was at least two generations his junior. He was the keynote speaker, and the man with the camera introduced himself and asked if he might take a picture. He was obviously so impressed to be meeting the speaker that I asked if he would like me to take a picture of the two of them together. He replied that he would be very glad of that, and first he would set up the shot. So he messed around with his camera and then I took the picture.

As I walked back to where I had been standing his wife laid on me an utterly unforgettable beneficent smile, like a gift, and mouthed ‘thank you’ and I nodded her a smile too because we both knew how beyond glad her husband was with the way this had turned out. Then he wanted to do me the honor in return and so I of course accepted.

So here it is, me and Mr Rodney Reynolds, publisher of American Legacy Magazine. I filtered up the picture for fun.

I asked these guys if I could take their picture. The guy in the dark shirt is saying ‘Well, okay, but I will not smile I will not smile ok, I’ll smile but I won’t look at you’. The guy in the lighter shirt is saying ‘Hey, I’m cool, sure, take my picture any time you want’.

My goal was to check out campsites on a very busy weekend and I learned many things.

1) before choosing, and many require reservations in advance, you must study up well – the book I had was entirely inadaquate to usefully distinguish one campground from another.

2) the tents-only campgrounds that you can reach by car are more crowded and less pleasant than the multi-use ones that include trailers and rvs.

3) campgrounds in the National Forests are better (quieter, larger sites) than those in the parks, but without facilities.

4) it looks do-able for anyone who wants to be there.

I stopped here for directions to my Saturday night accommodation and then walked the one block back after dropping off my bags. They were selling homemade cookies and powdered lemonade. The young girl also was promoting ‘A Martian Moment’ where she would be doing an astronomy talk there in front of her cabin at 11:30pm that night.

I managed to stay awake! Just that was feat in itself. I started walking but it was so dark I couldn’t get past the garage so I had to drive that one block.

I was the only outsider there at 11:30 and was treated to a lovely tour around the night sky. Mars was a gigantic red (really) marble. I can’t remember seeing as many stars since I was a kid. We were at 7,000 feet with no moon and no clouds. Mars was within two days of being closer to the earth than it would be in another 1,000 years. It was Fab.

Upon first arriving at the Greenwood Lodge I thought – I am in Big Trouble. This place was a wreak. It smelled like every day The Guy was frying up curry in rancid cooking oil and it was stuffy and impossibly hot upstairs with cobwebs and dust seemingly covering every surface. And check out that deck. Don’t you have to get a license? I asked myself.

The guest quarters were upstairs – the ‘curtains’ were shreaded bits of fabric, the carpet was old shag from the fifties, the bathroon was the size of a small walk-in closet and shared by all three rooms, I could go on.

But on the bright side, it did cool down, the linens were clean and cozy and since I slept right under a huge, well screened open window, I could look up to the sky, surrounded by trees and it felt like I was there, under a cover of amazing stars and in the morning dawn gave me a soft pale nudge.

That’s what I’ll remember and the rest of it has already faded.

Another nice thing was that when I complained about not having a three pronged electrical outlet in my room The Guy hooked me up with an extension cord so I could work out here on the deck, buzzed by a colony of hummingbirds, surrounded by fragrant trees and a streaming setting sun. Okay!

And here he is, The Guy, who told me on the phone twice and again when I arrived, and to each arriving guest, how he had given up his cubicle in Silicon Valley For All This.

better?

Sunday morning I’m up at seven with no sign that there is anyone who is even thinking about making breakfast at the Greenweood Lodge Bed and Breakfast and I’m thinking maybe that’s just as well considering the condition of the kitchen… No coffee even. So I head out to walk to ‘town’.

more.

and more.

And I’m walking and walking and then there’s this Park Ranger (we Love the Park Rangers) and I ask him ‘if I keep walking in this direction, will I run into coffee?’. He replies ‘Well, actually, no, but hop on in and I’ll take you to coffee.’ Don’t we just Love the Park Rangers.

At the Grant Grove complex there was one of those coffee kiosks that was just opening so I could get my favorite coffee drink and here is the recipe. Due to the experience of my Saturday morning brew this one tasted doubly good.

Take a double shot of expresso, pour it over a huge cup entirely filled with ice, top off the cup with more ice, add non-fat milk and a big fat straw and you’ve got yourself one fine beverage.

I did try to see the General Sherman tree on Saturday but the parking lot was in gridlock so I gave it a pass. This being the case I thought I’d better hit General Grant Grove just because. This is from a little side walk. I have a pano of the parking lot with a bit tree to go next, as soon as I get to it.

At this point I was thinking to drive through Kings Canyon and then hit the road for home but, feeling weak and ready for bed at 10:30am, I decided to just detour through Hume Lake, call this a Sequoia trip and forget Kings Canyon.

Isn’t this an appealing trail.

This picture is here because I spent five minutes chasing that butterfly around, trying to avoid stepping on the pretty flowers and still get his open wings. This effort got boring Real Fast, confirming my five minute attention span.

Coming into Hume Lake.

more.

Hume Lake has some public camping sites that were pretty nice but more than half the lake is taken up by a Christian Camp and isn’t really Park Service land. It is nice though, and I’m glad to know what it’s all about.

So that’s it. Sequoia in 24 hours with a bit of Three Rivers at the beginning and some Hume Lake in the end. And I could happily go again tomorrow…