After leaving the Redwood forests of northern California, we trekked across the state to investigate the draw of Lake Tahoe. What a beautiful area! We actually stayed in Nevada to avoid the expense of the Lake area, but spent a good deal of time near the lake.
Even tried kayaking it! After these next two pictures, well, you’ll notice there aren’t any more! The chop on the lake was so high (1-2 feet) that it was all we could do to keep from getting our kayaks swamped!
So we cried “uncle” after only about 20 minutes, and instead took a tour around the entire lake.
After just a couple days there, we worked our way closer to Yosemite by camping at a really cool locally run place called Horseshoe Bend Recreation Area. For most of our 4-night stay, we were completely alone except for the deer! And beautiful weather, though Californians would probably give their right arms for some rain.
Horseshoe Bend is located on Lake McClure, a rather large reservoir that’s part of the Merced River system that runs through Yosemite. We spent one evening hanging out on the lake, so relaxing:
it made a great base for visits to Yosemite, which we couldn’t get enough of. We spent the first day in the Yosemite Valley, with beautiful scenes of El Capitan:
On day 2, we headed up into the mountains for new views, even tracking down one of the Giant Sequoia groves, which we didn’t even know were part of Yosemite!
We hated to leave Yosemite, but more Sequoias called! It was on to Sequoia National Park, which left us speechless:
All in all this was an amazing journey from Colorado in March to California in September, through the western U.S. and Canada, up to Alaska and back down: Approximately 16,000 miles, 10 states and three Canadian provinces.
We’ll spend the winter in Phoenix plotting our course for next year’s adventures. We’re planning a grand tour of Midwest and upper Midwestern states, with plenty of time to visit family in the heart of the country. Thanks for sharing our adventures with us, and we look forward to what awaits us in 2020!