United States
Sequoia & Kings Canyon
Trees wider than your house and a canyon deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon, side by side.
The silence hits first: a cathedral hush beneath canopies so high your neck aches looking up. Giant sequoia trunks wider than a two-car garage rise from the Sierra Nevada forest floor, their cinnamon bark soft to the touch and impossibly old. Somewhere below, the Kings River has carved a canyon deeper than the Grand Canyon through granite walls that few visitors ever see.
Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks sit side by side in the southern Sierra Nevada, protecting the world's largest trees and one of the continent's deepest canyons in a single sweep of huge mountains, foothills and caverns. General Sherman, the largest living tree on Earth by volume, stands in the Giant Forest among a crowd of near-rivals, some of them three thousand years old. Kings Canyon plunges deeper at its deepest than the Grand Canyon, and the scenic byway into Cedar Grove, closed by snow in winter, winds along the river through a glacially carved gorge whose granite walls rise straight from the road. Wuksachi Lodge stays open year-round in the sequoia zone, and in winter you can snowshoe among the giants with the crowds gone and the bark glowing against the snow.
Family
Walking among trees that have stood for up to three thousand years gives children a sense of scale no classroom can deliver. The sequoia groves are flat, shaded, and short enough for young legs, while the wow factor keeps older children genuinely impressed.
Friends
The backcountry beyond Cedar Grove offers multi-day wilderness trekking through one of the most vertical landscapes in the Sierra: canyon floor to high country in a single route.
Couple
Evening light filtering through sequoia groves turns the bark amber and the forest floor gold. Wuksachi Lodge provides a warm base after a day spent in genuinely humbling surroundings.
- General Sherman is the largest living tree on Earth by volume, standing in a grove where its near-rivals crowd the same forest floor.
- Kings Canyon is deeper at its deepest point than the Grand Canyon; the gorge road runs beneath walls that rise straight from the river.
- Wuksachi Lodge stays open year-round in the sequoia zone; in winter, snowshoe routes thread the groves.
- One boundary holds huge mountains, rugged foothills, deep canyons, vast caverns and the world's largest trees: the park service's own inventory.
Dinner on the Kaweah at the Gateway Restaurant in Three Rivers, whose own motto is: the only thing we overlook is the river.
Fudge and ice cream from Reimer's, the red gingerbread candy house in Three Rivers with over fifty years of sweet tradition.
Öland
Sweden
A windmill-studded limestone steppe reached across six unbending kilometres of bridge.
Puzzlewood
England
Mossy boulders and twisted roots form a labyrinth that feels like Middle-earth made real.
The New Forest
England
Wild ponies drift through ancient woodland where Norman kings once hunted deer.
Glasriket (Kingdom of Crystal)
Sweden
Deep-forest glassblowing studios where molten crystal has glowed in the dark for three centuries.
Waimea Canyon
United States
Rust-red volcanic walls dropping thirty-six hundred feet through the emerald heart of Kauaʻi.
Kenai Fjords
United States
Exit Glacier retreating in real time; the trail markers show where it stood each decade.
Hawai'i Volcanoes
United States
Ground younger than you are, built by two of Earth's most active volcanoes.
Columbia River Gorge
United States
A flood-torn canyon whose green basalt walls stream with waterfalls, one of them 620 feet.