10 Things I Want to do Before I Turn 16: #7 Visit a National Park

Madison Walker
2 min readMar 1, 2021

This blog post will be a little different than the others in the series, but it will still be just as interesting as my other ones. Now I have not visited a national park yet, but my family plans on visiting California by the end of the summer (hoping COVID allows this).

Most people know the national parks in California as Yosemite or Sequoia National Park, but which one is better?

Yosemite National Park has gorgeous landscapes and all sorts of wildlife on it’s roughly 1169 mi² land. Whether you stay in a regular hotel or camp in the forests, you can’t go wrong with lodging.

Photo by Rakshith Hatwar on Unsplash

Yosemite is also home to over 400 different species of wildlife including fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals. Through the forests and terrain, Yosemite also has diverse plant life.

Photo by Johannes Andersson on Unsplash

However, Sequoia National Park has an interesting foundation to it. Established in 1890, the park was built to protect giant Sequoia. These are some of the largest and oldest living things.

Photo by Michael Bryant on Unsplash

These giant trees can grow up to 8,000 feet tall. Sequoia is also home to the largest tree in the lower 48 states. This tree elevates 14,494 feet tall. What makes these Sequoia trees special, is that they can live for up to 3,000 years.

Both National Parks are beautiful and unique in their own ways, but which one is actually better?

Yosemite hosts about 5.03 million people a year, and Sequoia National has around 1.5 visitors per year. Just by these statistics, you can see that Yosemite has more visitors per year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Yosemite is better.

I would rather visit Sequoia Nation Park than Yosemite because of the vast forests of Sequoia trees and wildlife. I also love to take photos of nature and I think that Sequoia National Park would look amazing in a photo.

Sources

“Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/seki/index.htm. Accessed 1 March.

“Yosemite National Park (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm. Accessed 1 March.

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