Into the woods

We've been in Three Rivers now for over a week, but our furniture and boxes are stuck in a warehouse in Roswell, the victim of a bottleneck that has occurred during the busy summer moving season. Frustrated as we are with the situation, we’re holding up fairly well with the camping gear, clothing and technology devices we brought with us. Since our moving contract expired on Friday, we’ll now be receiving over $100 for every day that we don’t have our stuff, so that ought to motivate United Van Lines to figure out how to get it here soon. We’ve also had issues with getting our internet set up. We barely get cell reception in the canyon, and wanted to use Skype for making calls from home, but without the internet working we have no way of directly troubleshooting the problem, so we’re going to have to get a land line. Even in this day and age, this process will take a week. Settled is not a word that enters our vocabulary very often right now.


Thankfully, happy is much more frequently used. Our first weekend here, we had little to do except get out and enjoy our new park, so we took two hikes in the foothills along different streams that are currently filled with significant snow melt from a long winter. The summer has been cooler than usual, which allowed us to hike comfortably in the foothills, when we would otherwise be roasting. We visited a small waterfall up Paradise Creek on Saturday and hiked up to the much larger Marble Falls on Sunday. Both days, we were struck by the awesome power of the white water. The cool spray counterbalanced the deafening roar from the falls making for a pleasant, if noisy, lunch spot.

Peter began his first whirlwind week of work by absorbing all that he could from his new supervisor, who happened to be finishing up his last week of work. Peter will now be tackling the challenges of this newly created position with minimal guidance from the person who spearheaded the effort to bring him here, which will present many challenges, but there are also opportunities for professional growth. In between numerous trips to the DMV, I met with the fire ecologist for the park and discussed an offer to bring me on as an emergency hire in mid-July working for the fire effects crew. I’ll spend the rest of the summer collecting and compiling field data from various study plots throughout the park, which will add to the ongoing research about how fire interacts with the ecosystem here in Sequoia and Kings Canyon.

This past weekend, it was hot down in the valley, so Peter and I retreated to higher ground in the Giant Forest, the most famous grove of Sequoias in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It contains the world’s largest living organism, the General Sherman tree, along with four of the five largest Sequoia trees in the mountain range. This old growth forest was protected back in the late 1800’s before it was significantly logged, so along with the Sequoias, there are Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and a variety of other evergreen trees that are of significant size for their particular species.

The forest is unlike any other I’ve ever been in. The giant trees provide ample shade, but the area doesn’t get abundant moisture all year like the Redwood forests, so the ground isn’t covered with plants and shrubs - mostly rotting logs and detritus from the evergreens. There are occasional patches of exposed rock, flowers and ferns on the ridges, but for the most part the forest floor is a carpet of brown. This makes the wetland meadows that much more striking. Streams coming down off the mountain pool in the flat depressions between surrounding ridges, forming patches of vivid green.

I know it sounds like I’m making this up, but the forest smells like baking sugar cookies and the birdsongs and rushing streams remind you of the background sounds you hear on those CDs where they combine classical music with the sounds of nature. It’s just the most tranquil place I’ve ever been. We sat on a downed Sequoia tree in the middle of a small meadow for an hour just watching the birds and enjoying the day.

On our return hike, we watched from fifteen feet away as a Pileated woodpecker hacked at a decaying log in search of grubs. We also saw four mule deer bucks with their antlers in velvet, a mother marmot and her baby, one juvenile black bear, a mother with three cubs, and another adult bear foraging for food at the base of a Sequoia tree! We’re chalking it up to beginner’s luck, because even the locals were amazed that we saw six bears on one hike. We ended the day at a going away party for Peter’s supervisor, Pat.

We’re very glad we decided to take this opportunity and move to Three Rivers. Each day gives us one more reassurance that it was the right decision for us. We look forward to continuing our exploration of the park and the town, but we’ll be putting that on hold at the end of this week as we go to Ashland, Wisconsin for a vacation/family reunion/wedding. I start working for the park the day after we return, so my next update will probably a few weeks from now.