Kings Canyon National Park doesn’t get the postcards that Yosemite gets or the General Sherman selfie line that Sequoia National Park gets.
Few people venture past Grant Grove to explore the magnificent canyon itself, or the 722 square miles that encompass its backcountry.
722 square miles is big – in fact Kings Canyon and Sequoia together are almost as large as the entire state of Rhode Island.
It’s commonly said that in Kings Canyon you can hike farther from a drive-able road than anywhere else in the lower 48 states.
I was unable to find a citable source for this, and multiple sources show the Thorofare area in eastern Yellowstone as the actual farthest at 21.7 miles, but it gives you an idea of the remoteness of the backcountry either way.
On our first trip here in 2012 we dragged Bighaus through the Grant Grove area of the Park down a narrow, overgrown, rutted dirt logging road in the Sierra National Forest and boondocked for two weeks completely off the grid – pretty exciting since we were new to the whole idea.
Our First Boondocking Spot in 2012
We finally got settled into our first boondocking spot high in the Sierra Nevadas in the Giant Sequoia National Monument.
Which was better than our last boondocking spot the next week…
Oh Snap
We did not expect to wake up to this!
Polly is too pretty and our risk tolerance has dropped drastically since those days when RVing and van life wasn’t on most people’s radar.
This time we opted to drop 2,500 feet into the canyon and stay at a campground around 3,900 feet for the first week since it had clear skies for solar to keep the batteries charged and Starlink to keep the work happening.
But this is a granite-walled canyon catching sun all day, and the afternoons were hitting mid-90’s, not what we’re here for!
We had been driving up daily to the Princess Campground (5,900 feet) for morning runs in the much cooler temperatures and saw a spot that was just open enough to work for us, so we moved up higher for the last week.
Kings Canyon National Park
The mandatory entrance sign photo
The park’s history itself is a little tangled.
What is now Kings Canyon National Park started in 1890 as tiny General Grant National Park, all of four square miles, set aside to save one sequoia grove from the loggers clearing everything around it, making it the fourth national park in the country.
John Muir spent decades pushing to protect the canyon country to the east, and after years of fighting off hydroelectric dam proposals, FDR finally signed Kings Canyon National Park into law in 1940, swallowing little General Grant whole.
Cedar Grove wasn’t added until 1965, and that’s the piece that gives the park its best canyon scenery today.
Cedar Grove is the part of Kings Canyon that actually earns the Yosemite Valley comparisons, sheer granite walls rising thousands of feet over the South Fork of the Kings River.
Minus the Yosemite crowds.
I Like It Lumpy
The massive chunks of granite in the Sierra Nevadas really are amazing
Zumwalt Meadow is the trail everyone in Cedar Grove ends up on, a short, mostly flat mile-and-a-half loop starting with a swaying suspension bridge over the Kings River, through a boulder field, into a meadow ringed by the cliffs of Grand Sentinel.
Down By The River
Finding a good spot along the South Fork of the Kings River to have lunch.
Kings River Lunch 360
The perfect lunch spot alongside the Kings River. Click and scroll around.
The sugar pines here are absurd – we kept finding cones over a foot long, heavier than they look, scattered across the trail. They are everywhere.
Lotsa Sugar
Not only are these sugar pine cones huge, they are everywhere along the Zumwalt Meadows trail
Give it an hour if you do the standard trail, two hours if you do it from Roaring River Falls as we did.
Mist Falls is the bigger commitment and the most popular hike in the park’s backcountry.
It starts past Cedar Grove at Road’s End, about eight miles round trip with 800 to 900 feet of gain, nearly all of it crammed into the last mile. The first couple miles are an easy sandy stroll through open meadow with ponderosa and lodgepole pines, deceptively so, before the trail turns and climbs through granite and trees until the river drops over a series of cascades, throwing enough spray to earn the name.
The trail itself is in amazing shape the whole way, kudos to the National Park Service trail maintenance team here.
Sierra Granite
We do love the granite monoliths and slabs in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Walk The Walk
The Mist Falls trail is extremely well maintained and is the most popular hike in the park’s backcountry.
Mist Falls
A pan around from the top of Mist Falls in Kings Canyon National Park
Start early, though – the canyon heat shows up fast and you don’t want that final hike back along the sandy trail under a high sun with an empty water bottle or backpack bladder.
In The Valley
It’s hot in Kings Canyon in the middle of the day – start early!
From Cedar Grove, Generals Highway climbs back out toward Grant Grove, the part of Kings Canyon most people actually picture.
This is dense sequoia country, trees standing in rows like they were planted, though nothing about a grove like this is planned. No camera lens captures their scale, and we just gave up trying.
Enter The Clump
Inspecting fire damage in the center of this clump of Giant Sequoias
Rugged Bark
The grooves in Sequoia bark are deep enough to put my entire hand in
Just Doesn’t Compute
It’s impossible to capture the true size of these trees in the camera lens
All In A Row
Lots of sequoias end up clustered in rows like this
Step Inside
Checking out the inside of a giant sequoia
Life And Death
Standing on a massive dead sequoia while looking up at another massive live one.
Just outside the park, the Giant Sequoia National Monument is the rawer, heavier-history version of sequoia country, Forest Service land split into northern and southern sections.
The northern half, where we camped in Princess Campground, was logging country before it was protected; Converse Basin nearby once held one of the largest groves of mature sequoias on Earth before loggers leveled nearly all of it by 1908.
Inside the campground it’s amazing to see a campervan parked next to a tree stump that is wider than the camper itself.
Grizzly Falls
A long exposure of Grizzly Falls in Kings Canyon National Park
The Chicago Stump is the gut-punch reminder of the damage we humans do to the earth when unchecked – a twenty-foot-tall remnant of the roughly 3,200-year-old General Noble tree, believed to be the largest tree in the world.
It was felled, sliced up, and shipped to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and reassembled to prove giant sequoias were real.
Fairgoers reportedly took one look and assumed it was a hoax, meaning it was chopped down in vain.
Chicago Stump
The stump of a massive Sequoia that was cut down and taken to the Chicago Fair.
The Chicago Stump in 2012
Throwback stump photo from 14 years ago
Hume Lake is the hot ticket for hot days, the hard part is finding a secluded spot since it seems everybody knows about this place, and the hordes of teenagers from the church camp at the north end of the lake are really pretty annoying.
We bought inflatable kayaks before heading out this summer, and they’ve proved to be worth every penny so far, paddling around the lake several days during our stay here.
Floating Away
Another day paddling on Hume Lake as storms pound the Eastern Sierras.
Hideaway
Our tucked-in spot on the western shore of Lake Hume is perfect for spending the day relaxing
Kayaking on Hume Lake
Kayaking on Hume Lake in the Sierra National Forest. As always, click the gear icon and select the highest quality.
For all that, Kings Canyon remains the quiet middle child of the Sierra Nevada’s big three.
Yosemite pulls in around four million visitors a year.
Sequoia and Kings Canyon together, managed as one unit by the National Park Service, set a combined record in 2024 at right around two million, less than half what Yosemite handles alone, and Kings Canyon’s individual slice of that is smaller still.
This means easier parking, trails without the crowds, and a real shot at having a spot in Mother Nature all to yourselves.
We’ll keep going back to Yosemite to explore the grandeur that is there.
But if you want the same granite, the same sequoias, the same glacier-carved drama, Kings Canyon is sitting right there, mostly empty, entirely worth the drive.
Colette said "bye-bye big trees" on our way out, and we’ll definitely return at some point years in the future when we have a Sprinter van or whatever the small self-contained campervan of the day is then.
Highly, highly, highly recommend.
If you can’t make the trip all the way into Cedar Grove, at least venture past Grant Grove to one of the many pulloffs overlooking the canyon and spend a few minutes taking it all in. It’ll be worth it.
