National Park #15, Canceled November 6, 2020
Kings Canyon was the second of only two national parks we were able to visit in 2020 due to COVID-19. My family came with us as we spent a day in Sequoia and the next in Kings Canyon, my old stomping grounds from summer 2002 when I worked at the Grant Grove front desk and served for a second summer with A Christian Ministry in the National Parks.
We got everyone up relatively early and grabbed some breakfast before starting down the Generals Highway to the bottom of the canyon. We expected to be stopped a long time for road construction, but it was only a five-minute delay. We arrived in Grant Grove Village (with a short detour to the park entrance sign off of highway 180) around 9:30 and turned everyone loose in the gift shops. I remembered a really cool overlook behind the village called Panorama Point, and since it was a clear day we stopped to take in the view. Back down the hill, our next stop was Grant Grove. The kids particularly liked playing inside some of the trees.
Then we began the long drive down into the canyon through Sequoia National Forest. I knew a neat little spot called Ten Mile Creek, which is really runoff from Hume Lake Dam. There’s nothing more than a wide spot in the road to park in, but knowing how much these kids love scrambling on rocks, we couldn’t resist a short detour. At the end of the day, most of them said this was their favorite stop. As we made our way deeper into the canyon, we paused at an iconic view and I pulled out the tripod to get a full family photo within the canyon walls. We stopped for a moment near the river by Boyden Cavern, then finally to everyone’s delight made it to Zumwalt Meadow (our first stop in Kings Canyon National Park proper since Grant Grove) where we enjoyed a picnic lunch. We took the kids on a short walk to the suspension bridge where we played Poohsticks, then we all visited Roaring River Falls.
Our last stop was Grizzly Falls (back in Sequoia National Forest), where the kids scrambled all over every rock they could find. They particularly enjoyed finding a way across the stream without getting wet. We made it back to Wuksachi in Sequoia at a reasonable time for dinner, despite some rain shortly after we left Kings Canyon and some really dense fog along the way.
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