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07.29.07 - Sequoia National Park - Day 4 (packing up, Redwood Grove, exhaustion)
This was too short of a vacation. On this last day we cleaned up the site and loaded up the truck. We wished Arnold a happy 40th birthday and mapped out a course to do a couple of short hikes on our way out of the park.
The Redwood Grove was fairly easy to find and we figured it was worth a stop as it's the largest Sequoia grove in the world. The road down was steep and narrow but the view at the bottom was worth it. Unfortunately there was not a 3 mile hiking route as we had hoped. The shortest route was 6.3 miles. We decided to just hike in a bit and then back out. However the views were so beautiful and the surrounding area so peaceful that we decided that we could pick up our pace a bit and do the 6 mile loop. After hiking for nearly 4 hours, we were resigned to the fact that somewhere we had gotten off track. At 5 hours we started to talk about rationing our food and water and what to do if it got dark. Soon after that we met up with two other hikers who were carrying a map. The were on the other 6.5 mile loop than the one that we had embarked upon. On looking at the map, it appeared that we had turned right at one point when we should have turned left and were well on our way to 13 miles of hiking. We kept them in sight and followed them for the rest of their loop and back to a parking lot that I was soooooo grateful to see again. Both our feet were covered in blisters and we could barely move once we stopped moving. We had been hiking non-stop for 7 hours at this point.
Too tired to drive the 8 hours home, we got an inexpensive motel where we could take hot and long showers, had red wine and fat free ice cream for dinner and crashed.
Yes, I could have done without that last hike but the entire trip was still fabulous and I'd do almost all of it again... and probably will.