School after School

So June, finally.  This week I am full of motivation and this was next on my list.  I started the fast track EMT course at the local ambulance company on June 1st.  It took me six weeks and I finished on July 21, so more on that later.  Because of my EMT course, we did not do any big trips for the month of June, just little weekend ones.  

Looking at our calendar, I cannot find a single thing that we did in June, but I did find out that I forgot to write about our Kings Canyon trip that we did the last weekend of May.  

We camped on Friday night and woke up to three inches of snow.  Our tent seems to be attracting a lot of snow.  It was one of the first weekends that the campgrounds were open and we found a brand new camp chair, matches, and hatchet in the bear box.  Then, one of our neighbor campers gave us an almost full can of white gas.  It was like Christmas.   

We ate breakfast and then went to look at the giant sequoias.  The largest grove of the giants is located in the park along with the largest tree in the world.  It was very foggy and cold, so we were not able to see the tops of the trees.  Behind me is the largest tree in the world by volume, the General Sherman Tree.  It is huge!

We saw one bear in a meadow.  It climber over a log and then walked across the trail and up the hill.  Chase made me walk on the trail once he walked up the hill.  I do not like bears and was afraid to walk by it (even though we could not see it anymore)  A group of people were yelling at us from the other side of the trail that there was a bear.  It was quite the commotion. 

There are many caves in Kings Canyon and we visited one of them.  The trail down to the cave had poison oak on both sides of it and Chase felt like his skin was crawling.  It was a neat cave with very many stalactites and stalagmites.

On the drive home, Chase took many pictures of the blooming dogwood.  This is one of my favorites.  Kings Canyon has many cross country ski trails that we are hoping to do after it snows a couple more feet.

Chase went to the boulders on top of the Bald Mountain ridge with his father and took some good pictures.  I think I was studying.

Here is one of Chase's father Chuck.

One one weekend, Chase went to Tahoe with the scouts.  He had to leave late Friday night to get to the cabin they were staying at.  They were going to go canoeing on the Truckee river, but it was too rough.  They ended up canoeing on one of the small lakes around Tahoe. 

The next day, they hiked to Dardanelles Lake (I think it is the right one).  Since it was mid June, the lake was freezing but one of the leaders and one of the boys still went swimming.  Chase was not the leader that swam.  Ready for July?  It is coming!