Tour Day 6 – Kings Canyon & Sequoia National Park

It’s a rare treat to get to stay in a hotel more than one night, but Bakersfield, CA gets two nights.  I have tried to warn everyone when I do room check to do their best to avoid suitcase vomiting all over their room to ensure that their funk doesn’t fester. But, alas, teenager gonna teenage, and inevitably when you do room check unfiltered adolescent stench is going to roll out.  Good news is that when we have multiple nights at a hotel we have a little time to cycle through laundry, so all of the sweat from triple-digit-temperature days gets cut a little.

Today was much better on that front as we climbed deep into the Sierra Nevada mountains to head over to Sequoia National Park. The temperatures were in the mid 80’s up in the forest. There is something nostalgic about going deep in the pine woods.  The lodge where we stopped to eat lunch in the park was a beautiful log structure that gave you a sense that you should be with Teddy Roosevelt negotiating a peace treaty with Spain.

You would have thought that today would have been a lighter bus ride. But nope. It was about two hours to the north entrance of the park and then about an hour drive down to where we going to see “General Sherman” the largest tree IN THE WORLD. The bus dropped us off at the trailhead of a half mile trail that led down to the tree.

It was at tree.  A really really big tree. No, you don’t get it. Think about how big you think it is – bigger than that. And really old. Most estimates put it at about 2200 years, but at least 1000 years. That tree predates the U.S., Columbus, and most Native American tribes. I asked Carol today if she thought trees “experience” what it’s like to be a tree. I mean, they don’t have brains, but they are “alive” right? It mentions in the Bible that if we didn’t worship God, that he would make the rocks cry out…Why not trees too? If that tree could talk it would tell of 2200 years, and all of that just a blip in relation to the rest of creation. And that tree’s life has meant something.  It’s mean oxygen for other life to breathe, I’m sure it is the parent of countless other trees in the forest, and it is a thing of awe for people from around the world to come and see (we heard languages from every corner of Earth today.

We don’t have 2200 years to experience being a human, really we have basically no time at all to make a difference in this life. So, I am so proud of this group of kids who are seizing the time  they have to make a difference in the lives of the people we encounter along our journey, the lives of the Sponsors, and the lives of their fellow singers. If the tree did anything today, it was to give some perspective our smallness and dependence on God, and a reminder of the urgency of making a difference with the time we have.

Goodnight from Cali.

Joseph