Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks

Earlier this week,  we visited Sequoia National Park. It was pretty much a park with lots of really high trees. I thought it was boring but it was made a billion times better with the recent snowfall. The trees were covered in snow, which looked really cool. There was a gigantic tree there named General Sherman, which is the biggest tree in the world. It was hard to admire that big tree with a snowball hitting you every second though .

             

 The next day we visited Yosemite National Park. (yo-sem-IT-e – I thought it rhymed with Vegemite, but mum kept correcting me). We took a 1 mile walk which should have taken 40 minutes. Instead we got partly lost and it ended up taking 3 and a half hours! The up side to that was that we were able to get within touching distance of seven deer. Strangely the only animal-related deaths in Yosemite are from deer. We heard about two deer – related deaths - one was from a deer kicking someone and the other was from a deer impaling a person with its antlers. The main attraction at Yosemite was two really high granite rocks. One is called Half Dome and the other is El Capitan. We decided not to walk up either of these, because it takes almost 10 hours to climb up either one and you can’t do it at this time of year as there is still snow up there and it’s dangerous.  We saw pictures of some daredevils  who decided to climb the rocks. These peaks are so high that most rock climbers set up a hammock halfway up, to camp the night out. That’s about 1800 ft. (about 600 metres) in the air, hanging against a mountain, like a bug!

I am thinking about bringing back the ingredients to make an American delicacy - S’MORES! We are staying at Evergreen Lodge, where they have a campfire every night and provide all of the ingredients to make S’mores – they are so good. S’mores consist of Hershey’s chocolate, special marshmallows and Graham Crackers. Usually, you melt the marshmallow over a fire and put in onto the graham cracker and chocolate and make something like a yummy chocolate marshmallow sandwich. I’d love to make them with my class, but we would have them with un-melted marshmallow and chocolate (raw) unless Mrs. MacDonald lets us have a campfire in the middle of the classroom. Fingers crossed.