Pinecones are roasting on a red hot fire, turning black then disintergrating into white feathers. Watching the orange touches lick charred wood, I think Sequoia is a world of orange and green. Orange tree trunks, poppies and the leaves of dead pine trees, green moss, almost fluorescent spring leaves, grass and pine needles. At the moment too the sky mirrors the grey rock strewn ground near our new campsite in the mountains.

After rambling in the foothills amongst wildflowers and blue sky we ascended the mountain and the clouds rolled in. It had been peaceful by the river, but pawprints on the dirt path conjured up images of mountain lions prowling and we considered that sign enough to chose a new adventure. Thunder boomed silencing chatter for a moment as we approached General , over 2,000 years old he stolidly disappeared into the canopy, the biggest tree in the world. Its base gripped the earth like a half dozen giant cat paws, anchoring the shallow rooted Sequoia from the fate of its forebears toppling to their doom. Between two of these knobbly paws was a little hollow, the entrance, we imagined, to a magical land: Narnia perhaps or the land of the Faraway Tree. We picniced beneath his branches then wandered the forest until the mountain chill called us campward.

I‘m sitting in my tent now, listening to the river rushing over rocks, laughter of children and the foreign now familiar Spanish language. We spent the day travelling from the not so wilderness of Yosemite Valley, to sprawling highways and chain warehouses and then looping back out again to wine country. The outskirts of Sequoia look quaint but wrong, grapevines growing out of pure sand, a parched rocky hill with a perfectly square acre of lush grass around the Italianate farmhouse. The lush green fields of mandarin and lemon look incongruous alongside drought riddled fields. The light is golden, the sun so warm that not even the overcast skies can keep out its rays.

In the now dark, Sequoia holds all the promise of a new day. What we have seen so far is exciting: rolling hills of red and green, paths running alongside rivers blushed with wildflowers. It is more relaxed here, people being within nature rather than admiring it at arms length. On my brief trot down a path I encountered a pair of women fresh from a swim slightly embarrassed in their underwear and then try as I might taking this path and that kept running into them, a maze where ever path leads to stripey underwear! I’ll see you tomorrow when the sun rises.

The road winding towards the Yosemite valley was stained with drifts of orange flowers. The river raged, the rapids bobbing with yellow life-jackets and blow up rafts.With the squirrels so tame and crafty, the deer barely blinking as we brushed passed and the curving road packed with tourists Yosemite wasn’t quite the Ansel Adams wilderness we had in mind. We dodged heavy breathing mid-westerners all the way up the asphalt path to the river, then at the fork took the opportunity for quiet taking the winter route up the mountain. We wound our way around, distant waterfalls a dime a dozen and came to the rocky shelf of the river. We lay in the sun, the cooling spray of the river bouncing off rocks misting us in cool and calm. Dylan read about the explorer Muir’s first summer in the Sierra and mourned the lost of his world, I napped away the hour.

When we approached the waterfall’s dizzying edge the crowds swelled, we were fortunate that the fools jumping the fence for a photo did not plunge to their deaths. Delicately negotiating the damp stair we came through the trees and suddenly the crowds didn’t matter. A rainbow arched at the base of the falls and we were sprayed with its thundering rain. Refreshed and renewed we sought out a rougher path.

Dylan ran out of site and I plodded upward. The mountain was in shadow as sun disappeared from the valley, but I was chasing the sunlight brushing the peaks. But too late, it was dim by the time I met Dylan, we climbed on. This falls were far higher than those of the morning and fell in curtains of shimmering mist, like the gauze of a wedding veil. We sat a while, I was disappointed at first to have missed my photo, but then I shrugged it off to just enjoy the place, easier to imagine in the solitude how the explorers would have felt on discovering Yosemite.

Of course we made it up the mountain without running out of gas, and the next day could roll back down all the way to the gas station the fuel bars having vanished 1 mile to the finish line. It wasn’t the first time we have encountered a mountain on an empty fuel tank, and hopefully escaping the jerrycan for a second time won’t make us cocky.

The night before we made the sinuous trek into the campsite. It seemed a magical, silent place. Rolling green hills covered in wildflowers, forest below and deers out for their evening meal, curious but not tame. Will had told us it was a blood moon that night and it was already hung low and swollen in the sky as we approached the site, empty except for a Mexican family with all the trimmings. We sat on the hill watching the sunset the city of Palo Alto and distant San Francisco to the east and the blood moon to the west eating leftover cold pizza and waffles, so content. Bed was snug, rest required for the long day of driving ahead on route to Yosemite National Park.