Looking for the Big Trees

Wed. Nov 12 It's a nice 55 degrees this morning when we leave Ridgecrest. We fuel-up before leaving town and there a few naval jets taking off, climbing fast and high out of the valley which is surrounded by high mountains. We take Hwy 178 towards Lake Issabella where we turn north to Kernville to enter the southern part of the Sequioa Forest. At Kernville we talk to the locals about our route. One, a retired deputy sheriff from that area, said we need to stop by the Ranger Station up town to check the road conditions because they had snow a few days earlier up there. The girls manning the station said they had to close the road 2 days ago. They gave us an alternate route that would be iffy on ice conditions or we could take hwy 178 to Bakersfield and try to enter the Sequioa Forest on the west side of the mountains. We choose Bakersfield. We ride along scienic, curvy Kern River from Lake Isabella till we make our way onto flat-to-rolling farm land. We stop for lunch when we turn on hwy 65. Next door is the Harley store, so we hit it before heading north to the big trees. As we leave Bakersfield we see oil wells running and they are drilling more. It's at least 1 well per acre of ground for miles along hwy 65. Soon we start seeing lots of grape vineyards. When we reach Exeter we turn onto hwy 198 which takes us into the Giant Sequioa Nat. Forest. You can't ride thru here very fast because it's a very curvy road going up the mountain and of all the animals you can encounter. One car stops us to warn that a mother bear and her cubs were just around the next curve at the picnic area. Lucky for us they had moved on. I kept seeing these balls hanging from some trees that had no leaves and along the road there were big brown round looking balls lying there. I had to stop a get a few and I told joe they were buckeyes, but they were larger than any I had seen. Later on I learn they are called California Buckeyes. Two miles from the Sequioa Museum where the tall trees are, we run into wet spots on the road, along with snow on the sides. I put my feet down on the pavement to check for ice because we had been warned of black ice. I didn't find any ice but we were extra careful when we got into the shady areas where the wet road hadn't dried off. It was slow going but we finally reached the giant trees and checked out the museum there. It was well worth the trip to see these giant trees and of how they have survived for all these years. It's 4:17pm and I tell Joe that I don't want to be going down this wet stretch of road when it freezes in a little while. On our trip down we have to stop at one point to wait for a black bear to get out of the road so we can continue. Unlike a car, there's nothing between him and my leg for dinner. As he leaves the road, he flushes 4 muledeer, one a nice buck, from the trees. When we get to the otherside of the curve in the road, we stop to look at him emerging from the trees on that side. We stop a couple more times as we decend down the mountain to take the beauty in. The mountain peeks at one point were sticking out of the clouds below us as the sun was going down. It takes us a good hour to reach Three Rivers where we eat supper. It's around 8:00pm when we made our way back to Exeter to spend the night.