General Highway Drive / Sequoia National Park

Driving the General Highway Drive from Kings Canyon to Sequoia National Park | Hiking the Buena Vista Trail | General Sherman Tree | Moro Rock | Camping at Patwisha Campground | December 2025

This morning, we left our spot in Sequoia National Forest near Hume Lake and made our way back to Kings Canyon National Park. We stopped frequently on the drive back up to take in the expansive views of the Sierras, knowing this could be our best view of the vast wilderness during our winter visit. We returned to Grant Grove trailhead for breakfast and to get a little work done, since we didn’t have reception at last night’s campsite.

Our goal for today was to drive the General Highway from Kings Canyon to Sequoia National Park. We were quite fortunate that there hadn’t been enough snow to close the road yet, though there were a few closures of side roads and trailheads along the way. Since we had cell reception here, we went ahead and booked a campsite at Patwisha campground in Sequoia for that evening, knowing stealth camping and reception would be harder to come by on that side. With that taken care of, we set off on today’s adventure.

For our first stop of the drive, we pulled over at the small trailhead for Buena Vista trail, a one mile trail that would take us to a short peak with great views. We brought our micro spikes since most of the trail was on North-facing slopes. It turned out that the snow and ice was patchy, and could have been easily avoided, but we still used our spikes for the last quarter mile since we had them. The trail had a very gradual elevation gain which made making it to the rock face at the top easy. From the top, we enjoyed the expansive views over the sea of clouds in the valley, and of the peaks to the North and South. But our favorite part was, of course, the far off snow capped Sierras.

Once we returned to the van, we continued heading South on the General Highway. We considered hiking to Tokopah Falls, but decided we didn’t have enough sunlight to do everything we wanted to do today, so we just had lunch at this trailhead and then continued on our drive…but not before checking if the showers at the Lodgepole visitor center were open, only to find that we were two days too late. Bummer.

Next, we decided that we needed to see the General Sherman tree, the largest tree in the world (by volume). However this would be a bit trickier than we expected, because the main parking lot for the trail to the tree was closed, leaving only the handicap lot right off the highway, which was already packed with as many definitely not handicap people crammed into it as it could possibly hold, plus some. We circled around a little before deciding to park in a large (legal) pull off on the highway, road walking up Wolverton Road to the Lodgepole-Sherman Trail, and taking that to the tree. Naturally, we had this whole stretch of trail to ourselves, and only ran into the crowds around the giant tree. We decided it was worth it to say we’ve visited it, and now if we ever return to this area, we can focus on the less busy areas…like the vast wilderness that we could only glimpse from a distance. Our ‘back door hike to the tree’ was about 2.5 miles long, and you can see our trail recording here.

For our last stop in Sequoia today, we took the Crescent Meadow road to the trailhead to Morro Rock. Curtis really wanted to do this hike, and was pretty sure I wouldn’t be interested because he knew the trail would be steep and precarious. But as soon as I saw it, I wanted to do it too. Sure, it’s a lot of steps up a narrow rock that juts out of the mountain, but there are railings the whole way up, there wasn’t ice on the trail, and definitely no thunderstorms today. Honestly I had never heard of this trail or lookout before, and it ended up being my favorite part of Sequoia National Park. We climbed up to the top, and soaked in the excellent unobstructed views of the Sierras to the South and East. We also had an excellent view of the very steep valley we would soon be descending, and saw exactly how far in the clouds came.

Finally, it was time to descend the many switchbacks down to Patwisha campground. It would have been fun to stay here until sunset, but we really didn’t want to do the drive in the dark. When we made it to the campground, we found our spot which was right next to the creek and settled in for the evening. The coolest part of this campground was when Curtis pulled out his UV light and found that there were centipedes all over that would glow in the light. Cool, but also gross when you have to walk across an open grassy area to get to the bathroom knowing there are LOTS of centipedes (that you can’t see without the UV light) crawling around. Apparently they are endemic to the area and one of the only bioluminescent millipedes.

And that concluded our time in Sequoia, and in these California National Parks that we had wanted to see for so long. Our visits to these parks were short and sweet, giving us a great introductory to the parks with less crowds. I’d say the things I’m most interested in doing if we ever came back would be backpacking in Kings Canyon and Yosemite, especially on less popular trails. We’re thankful we had the opportunity to visit them and check them off our bucket list, even though we know there’s so much more to see. For now, we were ready to return to less popular areas, stop paying for camping, and to make our long awaited return to the desert!