BGuthrie Photos: CA -- Kings Canyon Natl Park

CA -- Kings Canyon Natl Park:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. KCAN_090731_005.JPG: A Fiery Hand Shapes the Land: In fall 1955, McGee fire burned over 17,500 acres between Miramonte and the Kings River. Sparked by an escaped burn, McGee was a dramatic example of extreme fire behavior in the Sierra Nevada ecosystem. Natural fires were common and not very intense so they burned ground vegetation and debris, but left the trees. McGee left ashes and charred sticks where trees once stood. Sierran plant species play an important role in fire ecology. Bushes have oily leaves and shaggy bark to fuel fires so they burn in any fire, large or small. Trees here are adapted to fire in a different way. Giant sequoia bark can be two feet thick and pine bark several inches thick, so fire rarely harms the living wood. What Happened: After this area was logged in the late 1800s, few trees remained in this altered ecosystem where poor quality wood and branches were left to rot. Years of suppressing all fire here had disrupted the fire cycle. Dense brush grew under the trees forming fuel ladders. Fifty years later, the dry September wind carried embers from a prescribed burn into a tinderbox of old brush and scraggly trees. Fuel ladders allowed the McGee Fire to climb from the ground through the brush and branches into the treetops.
2. KCAN_090731_028.JPG: A Yet Grander View: "In the west Sierra wilderness far to the southward of the famous Yosemite Valley, there is a yet grander valley of the same kind. It is situated on the South Fork of the Kings River... beneath the shadows of the highest mountains in the range, where the canyons are deepest, and the snow laden peaks are crowded most closely together... Their general characters, however, are wonderfully alike and they bear the same relationship to the fountains of the ancient glaciers above them." John Muir, Century Magazine, 1891 John Muir was correct. Both Yosemite Valley on the Merced River and Kings Canyon that you are looking at now are grand and wonderful: and both were sculpted by glaciers. Glaciers shaped Kings Canyon in two ways. First, they widened it, plucking rock from the sides of the canyon as their icy masses moved down from the mountains. Then second shaping took place as the glaciers melted, retreating in stages back up the canyon. At each stage, they left a hill of pulverized rock and boulders, called a moraine. The outwash water from the melting glaciers carried immense quantities of gravel and sand, which then filled the areas between the moraines. Today, the moraines poke up through this outwash material on the valley floor. You are standing on a moraine now, and sleeping on one if you're staying in the aptly named Moraine Campground. This widening of the canyon sides and the filling of the canyon bottom gives us the U-shaped canyon you are enjoying today. As you leave, compare this view with the V-shaped unglaciated river canyon you drive through just west of here. It is hard to imagine Kings Canyon as it was several thousand years ago, filled with a slowly moving river of ice. It may be just as hard to imagine the Kings Canyon of today filled with hundreds of feet of water. Yet, that could have been the tale of this spectacular Canyon. You can learn the story of the long battle to preserve Kings Canyon at an exhibit located at Roads End.
3. KCAN_090731_151.JPG: Kings Canyon National Park
4. KCAN_090731_231.JPG: "The Lord is Good" -- I don't understand why a Christian youth camp is situated here. I have to presume it was grandfathered in.!
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AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Kings Canyon National Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kings Canyon National Park is a U.S. National Park in the southern Sierra Nevada, east of Fresno, California. The park was established in 1940 and covers 462,901 acres (1,869.25 km�). It incorporated General Grant National Park, established in 1890 to protect the General Grant Grove.

The park is north of and contiguous with Sequoia National Park; the two are administered by the National Park Service as one unit, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Geography:

Kings Canyon National Park consists of two sections. The small, detached General Grant Grove section of Kings Canyon National Park preserves several groves of giant sequoia including the General Grant Grove, with the famous General Grant Tree, and the Redwood Mountain Grove, which is the largest remaining natural Giant Sequoia grove in the world (covering 3,100 acres (13 km�) and with 15,800 sequoia trees over one foot (0.30 m) in diameter at their bases). This section of the park is mostly mixed conifer forest, and is readily accessible via paved highways.

The remainder of Kings Canyon National Park, which comprises over 90% of the total area of the park, is located to the east of General Grant Grove and forms the headwaters of the South and Middle Forks of the Kings River and the South Fork of the San Joaquin River. Both the South and Middle Forks of the Kings Rivers have extensive glacial canyons. One portion of the South Fork canyon, known as the Kings Canyon, gives the entire park its name. According to the Guinness book of world records, Kings Canyon is the deepest canyon in the United States with a maximum depth of 8,200 feet (2,4 km). The canyon was carved by glaciers out of granite. The Kings Canyon, and its developed area, Cedar Grove, is the only portion of the main part of the park that is accessible by motor vehicle. Both the Kings Canyon, and its Middle Fork twin, Tehipite Valley, are glacial “Yosemites” – deeply ...More...
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (CA -- Kings Canyon Natl Park) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2004_CA_Kings_Canyon: CA -- Kings Canyon Natl Park (17 photos from 2004)
- 1994_CA_Kings_Canyon: CA -- Kings Canyon Natl Park (18 photos from 1994)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Natural Beauty] [Park (National Park Service)]
2009 photos: Equipment this year: I mostly used the Fuji S100fs. I've also got a Nikon D90 and a newer Fuji -- the S200EHX -- both of which are nice but I still prefer the flexibility of the Fuji. Trips this year: Niagara Falls, NY, New York City, Civil War Trust conferences in Gettysburg, PA and Springfield, IL, and my 4th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles, Yosemite, Death Valley, Kings Canyon, Joshua Tree, etc). Ego strokes: I had a picture of a Lincoln-Obama cupcake sculpture published in Civil War Times and WUSA-9, the local CBS affiliate, ran a quick piece on me. A picture that I took at the annual Abraham Lincoln Symposium appeared in the National Archives' "Prologue" magazine. I became a volunteer with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Number of photos taken this year: 417,000.
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