Sequoia National Park

Most of the crew decided to head to Sequoia National Park, which is about 120 miles north of the campsite, but a 3 hour drive because you are on long and windy roads where you can only go 30 mph. It was a fun drive and it was worth it once we arrived to the park. It is a park that has one road, Generals Highway that goes through the very large park. It's main attraction is the redwoods, not as prevalent as the redwood forest but still breathtaking. We also climbed a monolith which is about 8,000 ft above sea level and 400 steps from the base. Once you arrive at the top and view the neighboring mountains every way, it was worth it!

There was a stretch of the road that they were working on within the park. Only one way traffic was possible on that section of the road. They set up a makeshift light and you wait at the light until it turns green, which is about 20 minutes! We went right through it on the way in, but on the way out, we waited more than an hour!

As we are approaching the light, we heard the sound of metal scraping on the road. It thought it was my car because it sounded so close, but I look up in the rearview mirror and I see the SUV behind me cutting over to the other lane (remember that there is no traffic going that way) and coming closer to us is a car heading to hit mine. I cut over to the left myself hoping to avoid this car. It did not feel like it hit me, but I get out and it did graze me! Their car, a red Toyota, supposedly had it's brakes go out and that was that sound. Luckily, the driver was smart enough to crash into the side of the mountain rather than veering off a cliff!

After a few minutes and making sure that they were all right, the suv that was behind me was nice enough to drive the other car's passenger down to the ranger station. We filed a police report and headed out around 10:30. We had headed from the monolith at 7:30 and it should have taken us about 40 minutes to get out of the park, instead took us 3 hours! We arrived back at the site at 2:30 and I was beat! The silver lining was that my car could have been worse had I not reacted as quick as I did.