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Jean and I went on a 6-day backpacking trip in Kings Canyon National Park.
On our first trip to Kings Canyon back in 1999, we'd hiked up to
Paradise Valley on a day hike and really enjoyed it. We noticed there were
backpacking camps there and hoped to someday do a backpacking trip there.
Two years later, we did that trip.
We left the Bay Area on Saturday. I'd hoped to leave by 9am,
but we didn't leave until about 1:15pm. Along the way, we
stopped at Casa de Fruta, where we ate lunch in the diner-like
restaurant. The burgers leave something to be desired, but the fish and
chips are decent.
It'd been over a year since our last trip to Sequoia/Kings Canyon. Since
then, they'd completed a new section of Highway 180. It helpfully
avoids the streets of Fresno for 3 or 4 miles.
I didn't bother to check which Cedar Grove campgrounds were closed. I also
didn't bother to get the park map which shows where the campgrounds are. I
figured I'd been here before. Well, we passed Moraine campground, which was
closed, and ended up going all the way to Zumwalt Meadow before turning
around. We went back (about 7 or 8 minutes) to Sentinel Campground and
set up at our camp around 7:30pm. It was relatively crowded for being after Labor Day,
I thought, but at least we didn't have the rowdy neighbors like in past
holiday weekends we'd been there.
Rangers are in the process of installing much larger bear boxes -- 3 times the
size of the old ones. This is either a testament to an increasing bear
problem, or a testament to the excess of American car campers.
The next morning we woke up at 6am and quickly broke camp. I'd called two
weeks earlier to try to reserve a permit, but they only accept reservations
three weeks in advance. I didn't expect it to be a problem, since only 7 of
the 25 spots were reserved, but I still wanted to be there at 7am when
they would start handing them out. I needn't have worried. When we
arrived at Road's End, there was no one there. We self-registered, filling
out the permit form and leaving it on the table.
After getting the permit, we returned to the Cedar Grove restaurant. Jean
wanted her coffee. Unfortunately, it wasn't open until 8am. So we set up
our stove and cooked our breakfast. We noticed there was a building for
showers; we looked forward to using it at the end of our trip. After
breakfast we stopped by the restaurant, changed into our hiking clothes,
and drove back to Road's End, where we prepared for our journey.
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