Of Tall Things

A busy and fun day yesterday, taking us from Oakhurst to the Sierra Forest to Fresno and back to Coarsegold.

It started with breakfast in Oakhurst. I had chicken-fried steak (and it's chicken, not country) with eggs and hash browns. That supplied good fuel for a short hike to one very tall tree, the Bull Buck tree in Nelder Grove. It's a sequoia, 242 feet high and 84 feet in circumference. And after passing many stumps of trees cut down in the late 1890s, stumps that are themselves as much as twenty feet high, the tree kind of sneaks up on you. Fortunately, we had my brother Andy as a tour guide, and he knows right where to go (and what to see along the way). The Bull Buck is very, very impressive.

The boys also had a blast hiking and climbing on stumps and taking pictures on the trail.

After that we drove down to Fresno to visit the Chafee Zoo in Roeding Park. After seeing a very tall tree, the boys got to feed a very tall giraffe, as well as seeing elephants, tigers, armadillos, geckos, emus, stingrays, and too many other animals to enumerate.

And after that we had dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory in Fresno. We didn't get to visit as much as we would have liked--the restaurant was crowded and noisy--but dinner was good.

And the boys slept very well last night.