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Another Yosemite Valley

Zumwalt Meadow Trail, S Fork Kings River, Kings Canyon NP (10/30/21) Bin Lin

Bet you didn’t know that there are three “Yosemite Valleys” in California:  Yosemite, Hetch Hetchy and Kings Canyon.

A “Yosemite” valley is the geologic term for a glacier-carved, U-shaped valley. California has three, though there are others on Earth.

This past Saturday, Bin Lin visited one of them … Kings Canyon, just as it was at peak.

S Fork Kings River, Kings Canyon NP (10/30/21) Bin Lin

S Fork Kings River, Kings Canyon NP (10/30/21) Bin Lin

S Fork Kings River, Kings Canyon NP (10/30/21) Bin Lin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Kings Canyon National Park (4,987′) – Peak (75 – 10%) GO NOW!

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Giant Sequoia Nat’l Monument

Black oak and Giant Sequoias, Giant Sequoia NM (11/3/20) Nhi Casey

There are over 80 groves of big trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in California.

The best known of them include the north and south Calaveras groves near Arnold, the Tuolumne, Merced and Mariposa groves in Yosemite, and 28 groves in Sequoia National Park.

That leaves 47 other groves, most of which are included in the Giant Sequoia National Monument designated by President Bill Clinton in 2000. The Monument encompasses 328,315 acres in the Sequoia National Forest, south of Sequoia National Park and east of Visalia.

Giant Sequoia are conifers, so they have no fall color, but their forests are populated with orange black oak, yellow bigleaf maple, rosy dogwood and other deciduous foliage.

Nhi Casey found the black oak peaking when visiting the Monument on election day, appropriate considering that many of the trees have been named in honor of past presidents.