I had eight days in California, but I had used up five of them. Work sent me to cover a conference in the Palm Springs area. My plane landed in L.A. on Saturday, February 8, and I spent Saturday with my friend Tom in California. (It's cheaper to fly to major airports, so by visiting Tom instead of flying straight to Palm Springs, I saved my company a hundred bucks in airfare, and another hundred bucks by not staying Saturday night at the expensive golf resort the conference was at.)
I took my rental car to Palm Springs for the conference, which lasted through Tuesday. Wednesday I spent buying product samples from West Coast supermarkets. This is how I was getting the rest of the week covered by work: driving around, hitting supermarkets.
I considered visiting to Barstow Caverns off I-40, but that would take a whole day to go there and back. Plus I was ostensibly here to check out supermarkets, and Barstow is in the ass end of nowhere. I'd be lucky to find a vending machine.
I made it as far north as Bakersfield by Wednesday night. I'm a cheap caver at heart, so even with an expense account, I hit a fast food place and then cut out a coupon to knock four bucks off my motel room. I was planning an excursion through central California, which has different supermarkets. I had limited time, since I was flying out of San Diego on Saturday, and I had to factor in time to drive back down there.
My plan was to reach Fresno by Thursday night. (Friday morning I'd shop, then floor it south the rest of the day to reach San Diego.) I could taking boring 99 straight to Fresno, or take 65, which led to Sequoia National Forest. And between me and the Sequoia was Porterville.
(Stupid story short: The towns of Tulare and Visalia are a few miles apart, and 150 miles north the towns of Turlock and Vernalis are a few miles apart. I mixed them up in my mind, and drove to the southern towns expecting to hit supermarkets only the northern towns had. So I had no good reason to drive up to Fresno, and thus Sequoia. But I didn't know that yet.)
This is a long convoluted way of saying I was driving to Sequoia National Forest. And going through Porterville, home of the NSS Convention come August, to get there.
California was mostly developed after the popularity of the train and automobile, so towns are arranged at regular intervals off major roads (which were built to follow major train tracks). It's different from New Jersey. Roads are squeezed in the shrinking undeveloped space between towns. So we have twenty major highways in a square mile, and it still takes all day to get to Paramus.
Porterville will be home to hundreds of cavers come August. I knew there were only a couple caves in the immediate vicinity, and none of them show. I probably wouldn't get a chance to cave today, but there was always Crystal Caverns in Sequoia.
There was no welcoming committee for me in Porterville. No "Welcome Cavers" sign. Not even an arrow pointing where the campgrounds are. I guess that's what I get for being six months early.
There's a big mountain to the north of Porterville, with a monstrous antenna topping it. There's no problem getting radio stations, although if you subtract Spanish and Christian stations, you don't have much left. And by Christian stations I don't mean Jars of Clay, I mean lectures on creationist science.
I was aiming to have a late lunch at Sequoia, so I wasn't looking hard for restaurants in Porterville. I didn't see any worth touching the brakes for. I did see a couple low-priced motels, if people want to save schlepping their tents on an airplane (although reservations would probably be a smart move).
I was expecting to see signs for show caves, but there aren't any in this area. Crystal Cave isn't advertised. Sequoia National Forest had road signs, though. I'm not a rabid fan of giant trees. I like them, but I don't make a day of treewatching. But if I'm ever in Easter Island, I'm sure as hell checking out the giant heads. And when I'm near Sequoia, I'm checking out the giant trees.
There's about an hour of meandering through the mountains after you get off 65 and before you get to Sequoia itself. I drove by a Paul Bunyan statue 15 feet tall, carved from a single block of wood. Funny: Jersey City has its own Paul Bunyan, holding a roll of carpet. At least this Paul Bunyan is in a forest, instead of under the Pulaski Skyway.
I stopped for gas at Lemon Cove, a town whose sign advertised as having a 190 population. From what I saw of Lemon Cove, the sign was an overstatement.
Signs by the toll booth to enter Sequoia warned that only cars with snow chains or snow tires would be permitted to drive through the forest. Aw crap. I was going to be turned away after driving all morning, because I didn't think to ask an Avis clerk in sunny Los Angeles about snow chain rentals.
It would be a hassle to turn around, so I kept going. It was warm for February in this part of the country, and there was no point in snow chains if there wasn't snow on the ground.
The main driving road through the forest is a backward C. I was coming in the south end. Two hours later, the guide at the information booth said, I'd come out the north end, pointed directly at Fresno.
Crystal Cave was closed, until May. It'll be open for visitors come Convention time, but not my particular convention. The tree you can drive through was also closed.
I also hesitantly asked about snow chains. I had made it to the information booth without anyone noticing my insufficient tires, so I played the odds that I wouldn't be thrown out on the spot. "You probably already have them," the guide said. "Look for an M & S on your tire." I went back to my car and sure enough, I had snow tires. Most all tires are snow tires. It's only in southern California, where snow is as rare as a tornado, that this specifically gets brought up.
The trash cans at the tourist booth were of the bearproof variety. I have never seen a bear in the wild, but was hoping to see one this day. Didn't happen. I did see two giant bucks as I was coming back down the mountain, though.
I passed a multitude of trees, but none of them sequoias. Giant sequoias only grow in the upper reaches between 5000 and 7000 feet (which is why no one grows sequoias in their backyards, except for the Lemon Cove 190). I had some ascending to reach that height. I stopped at the lookout by Moro Rock on the way up, but Moro was completely covered in fog.
In the parking lot of the museum (free but donations are collected in a clear plastic box) I got my first burst of hail. Big hail, the size of wasabi peas. The pellets weren't big enough to dent the car or hurt when they hit me, but they were enough to turn the parking lot to rice pudding. The hail was coming from the cold upper atmosphere, and landing on earth that was much warmer. There wasn't any icing, just hailstones in meltwater soup. It was possible to slip on it, but it was much more stable than ice.
Inside the museum a retired couple asked about the Paul Bunyan statue, why he wasn't in Minnesota. I was happy to bring up the Jersey City statue, and how it shows up in the Sopranos opening. At this point I found out that the museum clerk not only knew the statue, but was from Red Bank. New Jersey has permeated every part of the world, it seems. And the world is better for it.
The museum gave me all the sequoia trivia I could remember. They can be wide as three lanes of traffic, tall as the Statue of Liberty, and easily the heaviest living things in the world. Technically a species of redwood grows taller, and some Mexican trees are larger around the middle (although they're groves of trees growing together, and not one single tree), but sequoias are unquestionably the biggest.
It was a half hour drive to reach General Sherman, the world's biggest tree. I was nervous about driving on the hailstones, but they didn't interfere with traction at all. The road was technically covered in ice, but I could still stop on a dime. Not that I was testing that.
I finally began seeing giant sequoias. One would just be at the side of the road, this epic expanse of orange bark. Another couple hundred feet, and there was another one.
A good forty foot diameter around General Sherman is fenced off. Sequoia root systems are mostly in the first three feet of soil, so tourist trampling can wallop them pretty good. It might be baseless precaution, but I wasn't looking to hop the fence and kill something that weighed as much as Belgium.
I kept ascending up the mountains. I saw my trees, now time to complete the C and get to Fresno. I slowed down to 5 mph whenever another car came by, which wasn't often. I was routinely braking to a full stop whenever I went 20 MPH, just to make sure I wasn't at risk of skidding. Smashing a rental car is better than smashing your real car, but it's still nothing you want to do.
My map said I was at 6700 feet. A note further up was for 8044 feet. That was a lot of uphill in ever-deepening hail.
A long downhill straightaway loomed in front of me. I came to a full stop, skid free. If I was on skis, this would be great. As it was, it was terrifying. There was only one set of tire tracks left on the road, and that was almost covered up by now. The yellow divider was completely covered. The guide said it was just an hour to Sherman and another hour to get out the north entrance, but it took me a lot longer than an hour to reach General Sherman.
This whole time I was acutely aware that I was in a national forest, with a sizable staff to protect dingbats who get lost or hurt. But staring down that road, I got the full realization that the nearest ranger was a long ways off.
The only reason I was cutting through this tundra was to save some driving time. I wouldn't be saving a thing if the car skidded off the road. How was I to know there wouldn't be a real patch of ice coming up on the road? It would only take one, and I'd be a Toonces sketch.
I wasn't worried about the car any more. This was past the point of me walking back to a pay phone. The nearest phone was hours away, and I had a T-shirt and jacket with a broken zipper on. I hadn't seen a guard rail for miles. If I had an accident, the rest of my life might be a couple seconds of free fall.
I hit the brakes. I was turning around. It was a hassle, but this downhill road was a bigger hassle.
As I slowed down, my tail end spun to the right. Just a bit, and in the direction of the mountain instead of the cliff, but enough to count as a skid. I made the most careful K turn in the universe, and slowly accelerated up the hill.
If the steering wheel had a throat I would have choked it I was gripping it so hard. I had about twenty minutes of hell hail driving before reaching the downhill, so that was another twenty minutes of hell hail backtracking. I didn't pass a single car. I could barely see my own tracks from less than an hour ago.
I got below the constant hail level, and was able to unclench several muscle groups. I was driving south now, and the trees were green as a granny smith apple. I checked the backside of the trees, and there was no moss on that side. The moss was only on the north side. I had heard moss only grows on the north side of the tree since I was a kid, but it never seemed to play out in real life. Expect here.
The danger area was past. Time to relax. But just as I did, I saw a car on its side in a ditch. I asked the man photographing it if he was OK. He said everything was fine, considering. No one got hurt, the rangers called a tow truck, he had a ride off the mountain, and he was just getting pictures for insurance. This guy was right in front of the museum and it was taking him all day to deal with the accident. That's a hassle.
It took a couple hours to backtrack through those windy roads, down through Lemon Cove and back to Route 99. But I got there with the rental car intact.
Too bad I didn't get a chance to cave this day. But I had a plan to cave before the week was up.