Mountain Road 50 out of Pine Flat, California (August 25, 2021)

We flew from Austin to Burbank on August 24, stopping on our way to California Hot Springs at the Sprouts in Bakersfield.  We were surprised to be the only shoppers wearing COVID masks. After spending the night at a HomeAway in Pine Flat, near California Hot Springs, we took Mountain Road 50 from Pine Flat to the Trail of 100 Giants, a grove of giant sequoias. How giant?  See how tiny I look at the base of the tree?

Mountain Road 50 is a long, winding road.  No going 80 mph here!

Desert snugs up against the Sierra Nevada mountains on the west side.  The sequoias are gigantic, and so are the cacti!

That afternoon, we drove north to Kings Canyon at Kings Canyon National Park.  The canyon is the deepest river-cut canyon in the United States at 8,200 feet deep.  By comparison, the Grand Canyon's deepest point is 6,000 feet.

Boyden Cavern, inside the Sequoia National Forest adjacent to Kings Canyon National Park, was formed over 100,000 years. A survey crew discovered the cavern in the late 1800s, but it was Putnam Boyden, a logger from the Hume Lake area, who had the idea of opening it up to sightseers. In 1907, Boyden built a wooden gate across the entrance and offered tours for about 5 cents per person.  He also lived in the cavern for 10 years, getting it ready for public tours.  

At the Christmas tree inside Boyden Cavern.

Exiting Boyden Cavern. The path out is a creek bed that sometimes has flowing water in it.

The trail up/down to/from Boyden Cavern.  The hardest part of the tour!  The cavern lies beneath the 2,000-foot marble walls of the Kings Gates.

How cool is it that our rental car has a COVID plate?  When we got back to the HomeAway, we discovered that the cleaning crew mistakenly thought we were checking out that day so helped themselves to our unopened bag of chips.  Waaa!

View of the marble mountain as we left Boyden Cavern.  Made me wonder how many mountains have become marble floors, tabletops, counters, etc.