Sequoia National Forest - Part 1

Back in March, some friends were staying with us for the weekend for some much needed down time when we started talking about traveling.  I mentioned I always wanted to see those REALLY BIG trees you can drive through.  We've all seen those old time photos (like the one below) and I wanted to see these monster trees for myself.

Turns out they aren't way up in Northern California like I thought, but only an almost short 5 hour drive away near Fresno.  Our friends had been there before so we sat down at my trusty laptop and checked out the Dorst Creek Campgrounds they stayed at before to see if there was anything available around the 4th of July.  About 20 minutes later we had reservations for 5 days of camping and hiking fun!

Fast forward to the middle of June and we were all getting excited about our trip.  GG freshly graduated from High School (Did I not mention that?  She GRADUATED can you believe it?!  I'll post about that later.) decided to kick it at home instead of going on our trip.  

Her first weekend home alone.. who can blame her?  But we did manage to convince our Lone Wolf with boyfriend in tow to join us for the fun.  That brought our camping party up to 8 including The Hubs, The Tweedles, myself and our two friends who had been there before.  Not quite a complete family vacation but pretty darn close!

Now, if you follow that link above to Dorst Creek you'll find at the bottom a mailing address for the campgrounds.  That was the address I used to determine the weather while we'd be up there.  It was looking pretty good.  High's in the 100's and nothing lower than 56 at night.  Might make for some hot hikes, but otherwise, it looked like it was going to be great weather.  And I forwarded all this information to everyone so we could all pack accordingly. Silly me assumed that the mailing address would be for the camp, but no no no, that's for the main office 4000 feet lower than the 7000 feet we actually were.  While the days were lovely at mid-70s, it got down to chilly low 40's / upper 30s at night.  COLD.  Let me rephrase that.  FREEZING.

That first night I wrapped up The Tweedles in their warmest (which wasn't all that warm, I wasn't expecting low 40s / upper 30s after all) jammies, piled on their hooded sweatshirts - hoods up - and socks on their hands and feet and snuggled them into their sleeping bags which were on two layers of additional sleeping bags to keep them off the ground.  Sometime around 3 am the temperature, already cold, nose-dived and Bug was waking me up to tell me how cold he was which only added to how cold *I* was.  Poor little guy's teeth were chattering so hard he could barely talk.  Bunny wasn't far behind.  So after a quick trip to the potty - real toilets were a requirement, I don't like outhouses - we all climbed into our two-person sleeping bag.  All four of us.  In a two person sleeping bag.  Talk about pigs in a blanket!  We all had to roll the same way and we couldn't move.  I had Bug at my back and with his little furnace body churning out the heat, I was sweating from my neck to about my knees - the full length of his little body.  However, I couldn't feel anything from the knees down it was so cold.  It was a long night.  We quickly decided a quick trip to Lodge Pole General Store the next morning was in order to purchase an air mattress to get the Tweedles off the ground so we could all sleep more comfortably.

And despite all of that, we didn't even care because on our very first night in camp, we got to see this lovely doe behind our tents. 

If you click on the image you can see the doe better.

 Now that's how you start a vacation!