Tuesday August 30, 2011

 

 

Calaveras Big Trees State Park

 ~ Saturday Afternoon, August 27 ~

 

 

Jerry and Joyce were the ones who told us about Big Trees State Park, when we asked about nearby places of interest. He brought a large pine cone to show us – a souvenir from their visit to the park.

He also brought a tomato from their garden, a bunch of grapes from their arbor, and two peaches from a local market. (I forgot to photograph them.)

 

 

The new scenery was a delight to our eyes, and the taste of grapes and one of the peaches was a delight to our taste buds – our lunch – during the two-and-a-half-hour drive.

 

~~~

For supper, we put yummy slices of fresh tomato into cheeseburgers from Burger King. I expect the guy at the drive-through wondered why Cerwin asked for two cheeseburgers and a knife. (We needed it to cut the tomato into slices.)

The other peach was our dessert. Food for those two meals didn’t cost very much that day.

~~~

 

We saw acres and acres of neat vineyards in one area.

 

 

We were surprised to see many dry, brown hillsides and fields, and often wondered what the cattle were eating when we saw them roaming the fields.

 

 

The scenery began to change as we approached the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

 

 

Loved this old house

 

 

Angels Camp is a quaint, old mountain town with narrow streets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We drove over tree-lined roads for miles and miles.

 

 

Then we were there – Calaveras Big Trees State Park.

 

 

Old, fallen trees looked like giant dinosaurs

 

 

Then there was Big Stump, the center of attention that fascinated everyone at the beginning of the trail.

 

 

It was twenty-five feet across and 280 feet tall when it was felled by speculators (vandals) who wanted to turn pieces of it into a traveling exhibit.

 

 

 

 

You can see the long-handled auger marks on the stump behind Cerwin – which is what was used to fell the tree in 1853.

 

 

When the rings were counted in 1853, it was determined to be 1,244 years old – relatively young for a giant sequoia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I stood there, breathing in the fabulous scent of redwood on an afternoon when the weather was perfect, I would have liked to find a good book and a hammock.

 

 

A man who noticed that we were taking turns photographing each other, offered to take a picture of the two of us together

 

 

There was another grove of large redwoods about a mile away, but Cerwin is not an avid hiker, so we decided to use the next two hours driving to Yosemite instead of walking.

 

 

I was okay with that, because I had never seen Yosemite.

 

 

So we turned our comfortable, Ford truck (rented from Budget) toward Yosemite and drove even deeper into the Sierra Nevada mountain range.