Images of Kings Canyon National Park – Central California, taken in September 2018.

When established in 1940 Kings Canyon National Park was set aside primarily as a wilderness park. While the western section of the park with the General Grant Grove of Sequoias attracts the most visitors it is the eastern section that boasts the most spectacular landscapes with its granite peaks and glacier carved valleys.

I drove through Giant Sequoia National Monument to the Roads End on the Kings Canyon Scenic Byway, the only road that travels to the eastern part of the park, where my goal was to hike 12.1 miles round trip to Mist Falls and then to Paradise Valley. That plan turned out to be a little too ambitious and I ended up turning around at Mist Falls making my round trip hike only 9.7 miles. I was pestered by gnats and bugs along the way, luckily bug spray kept my discomfort to a minimum, but it was a spectacular hike nonetheless. The entire valley is made up of towering white granite peaks and canyon walls and you hike through cedar forests and over smooth granite domes. There were amazing vistas no matter which way you looked.

After stopping for lunch at Mist Falls I began my return trip down the trail. As I made my way through a granite boulder field I rounded a corner and was surprised by a small brown bear on the edge of the trail about thirty feet ahead of me. It froze and looked at me; I froze and said “oh hey”. I don’t know why I said that, it’s just what came out in the moment. Maybe I was trying to make the bear feel relaxed by being casual; you don’t want to upset a bear when you run into one in the wild. Being hysterical or aggressive can only lead to confrontation. Then there was the realization that this was a yearling cub which meant that mother bear was somewhere close by, but where? The two of us “unfroze” at the same time; it moving across the trail, me raising my camera to get the shot. Of course, as seems to always be in these situations, I had the wide angle lens on my camera instead of the zoom. No time, I had to just make do with what I had and I squeezed off several shots while the cub crossed the path and back into the brush. Not knowing where the mother bear was I waited a few minutes before I continued on eventually making it back to the trailhead having had a remarkable wildlife encounter in a place worthy of the name Kings Canyon.