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| Hiking | 3.10 Miles |
570 AEG |
| | Hiking | 3.10 Miles | 1 Hour 35 Mns | | 1.96 mph |
| 570 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | Woke up in Visalia and listened to Sequoia / Kings Canyon road status information. As we suspected, after several days of heavy snow the through drive on CA-198 was closed and driving to higher elevation from either side required chains. We decided not to bother with chains and just go from Foothills side as high as we could. Ranger at Foothills Visitor Center told that we could drive without chains no further than Amphitheater Point and advised some hiking in the lower elevations. We tried to drive to Amphitheater Point passing vehicles that were putting on chains in all pullouts and sometimes simply in the driving lane until we reached a point where all the traffic just stopped and we saw it standing still for several switchbacks upper. We decided not to take art in that manifestation for nothing (couldn't get to sequoias anyway) and drove back down to Hospital Rock where a large Indian village once stood on Kaweah river.
There we took a quick look at pictographs on the Hospital Rock itself, went down on a short Hospital Rock River Trail to a series of pools and little waterfalls on the river, then returned and continued to Buckeye Flat campground (closed for winter). Paradise Creek trail begins in the campground, follows Middle Fork of Kaweah River for a while, passed a dam that doesn't hold any water and then crosses Middle Fork via a wide foot bridge. Shortly after that there is a fork on the trail: going to the right you come to a bottom of a waterfall on Paradise Creek, going to the left you get to the top of waterfall and the trail continues up from here. When slick rock is dry it's possible to go up along the falls from bottom to top, but the day we were there it was very slippery and we went around by the trail. After this waterfall the trail moves away from the creek and goes parallel to it at a distance so that you can hear it, but cannot see. Manzanitas along this trail make quite an impression: in Arizona they are bush-like, but here they are full-size trees 20-30 feet high and with trunks up to a foot in diameter. At about 0.7 mi from campground the autumn turned to winter and after another 0.1 mi we decided that it was time to go back. |
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Autumn Foliage Observation Isolated
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