Well Memorial Day weekend is almost here and the crowds have started to descend on every campground and park. It's getting crowded here and I was thinking of moving on, but the hard part is where. I checked into Yosemite and found that Memorial Day weekend is the busiest weekend of the year. Even if I could find a place I wouldn't want to deal with the crowds. The people at the Sierra National Forest office said that if I didn't have a reservation by now at one of the few campgrounds that are open, then I wouldn't have a prayer. Besides most of the hiking there is in the high country and that is all still snowed in. Remember all those snow storms in the Sierras in the news this winter? I do now. So I've reverted to plan C ' visit the Kupecs in San Jose early. They are leaving Sat. morning for Big Sur, but it will give me a chance to catch up on some things I need to do (yes, I am still not in the mode of total irresponsibility).
Yesterday after driving to a small town library to use the internet to no avail (see above) I took Abbey for a walk up a jeep road in the national forest that was closed to travel. There was a little snow on the road, but not enough to bother us. It got pretty hot, which made it hard to believe that we were walking amid all that snow. Once again, Abbey enjoyed rolling in it. Later on, I drove into Sequoia NP for the first time. The trees in Kings Canyon are real nice, but Sequoia is a whole other story. Especially the Giant Forest. They are incredible. Sequoias aren't all that pretty of a tree. The trunks are huge, but the branches don't stick out that far and are very irregular. They don't have a great shape at all, but they still are amazing. They are just immense. The world's largest living thing, the General Sherman tree, is 275 ft. tall and over 36ft. in diameter at the base. After that, I thought that Sequoia was a better park than Kings Canyon, until today. Today we drove down into the actual canyon. With the snow-covered mountains in the background, it is a beautiful sight. I sure would like to come back here someday and go backpacking in the backcountry. We did try a short, but steep hike in the NF but pretty early on I got a big scare. Abbey started limping and holding her leg up ' the one she had knee surgery on in December. I'm hoping that it's just a temporary setback, but it doesn't look good. The hike wasn't even that tough and she wasn't running around that much. I'm not sure how it even happened. I'll just have to wait and see. This could change a lot of my plans, or at the least force me to leave her in the RV if and when I go hiking. Now that I think of it, it's better that we're just hanging out at the Kupecs for a while and not going somewhere else this weekend.
 The General Himself |  A General Perspective |  Giant Forest |
 Giant Perspective |  Kings River |  Roaring River Falls |
 Grizzly Falls |