While buried in rush hour on an L.A. freeway, I noticed the most sucker-punch piece of advertising in the city. It stretches across a storefront awning on Pico Boulevard, just high enough to be read by any hapless commuter sitting it out with the other convulsing tailpipes. The sign belongs to Adventure 16, an outdoor and travel outfitter. In large letters it reads NEED SOLITUDE?, and it faces northbound traffic on one of the most dreaded highways in the country. Drivers who see it will no doubt spend a few extra minutes that day assessing their lives. If traffic is really heavy, they might even pull off at the next exit for a closer look.

Flipping through a catalog of guided wilderness trips at A-16, I noticed that the store had plenty of solitude in stock. The soonest available was a four-day trek through the High Sierra in Sequoia National Park, a trip ranked as 'rigorous.' For the experienced backpacker, it promised heaps of pristine alpine terrain and, of course, bountiful solitude. For the less experienced, the catalog pointed to some shorter, easier trips that were decidedly leaner on solitude. I quietly signed up for the rigorous trip, and then sat through a few in-class sessions with a group of apt hikers discussing freeze-dried menus and the precise magnetic north declination at Sequoia's Wolverton trailhead.

Soon enough I'm carpooling up Interstate 5 with my new classmates and a trunkload of gear. We head northeast, past Bakersfield and the manurelands of California's central basin to the General's Highway, winding our way into the western Sierra Nevada and the gates of Yosemite's much quieter neighbor to the south. After Yellowstone, Sequoia is the oldest national park in the country, a 604-square-mile tract of canyons, forests, rivers and looming granite peaks. It's also home to the largest living thing on the planet, the behemoth sequoia named the General Sherman Tree. It resides in what the Scottish-born naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir called the Giant Forest when he surveyed the area more than a century ago. Muir had stumbled upon scattered groves of the most unimaginably large trees he'd ever laid eyes on. The giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum), as they came to be known, are in fact the biggest trees in the world by volume, and some of the oldest. At age 2,700, General Sherman is still a giant among giants, a tree that could turn a blue whale into a smelt. I plan to pay my respects on the way out.