Early roots
Most people know Yellowstone was the first national park. Ask what the second was and you may get shrugs, but it was Sequoia National Park, and it’s celebrating its 135th year on Sept. 25.
Here’s a look at the trees it was named for — the largest on the planet — and how the national park system has grown.
Jurassic Park?
The oldest known redwood fossils date back more than 200 million years to the Jurassic period, and the trees once grew throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The last giant sequoias are in about 73 groves scattered over 48,000 acres along the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. The northernmost sequoias grow in Tahoe National Forest, and the southernmost groves are in Sequoia National Forest northeast of Bakersfield.
Giant sequoias live a very long time and grow quickly. They require a lot of water, which is mostly from the Sierra snowpack that soaks into the ground.
Fire isn’t necessarily bad
The giant trees rely on low-intensity fire to help open their cones to disperse seeds. Flames clear undergrowth and add ash and nutrients to soil. Sequoia seedlings need rich soil and lots of sunlight in areas free of competition from other plants to thrive. The 59,000-plus acre Garnet fire, which began Aug. 24, has threatened a grove north of Sequoia National Park. This blaze is intense enough that firefighters used water lines to moisten the soil around trees and wrapped their trunks with fire-resistant foil blankets. The fire was 87% contained as of Wednesday.The trees’ mass can prevent them from getting blown over by high winds. Their bark is so thick it can protect them against fire and harmful insects.
Heavy load
They are on average not as tall as the related coastal redwoods, but no other living thing can grow to the overall size of the giant sequoias. Coastal redwoods and giant sequoias are both considered California’s state tree since they are both redwoods. The General Sherman Tree is the largest of the sequoias, with a trunk volume of 52,500 cubic feet. It is estimated to be about 2,000 years old. Some sequoias are more than 3,000 years old. The biggest tree in Sequoia National Park weighs 642 tons, which is about 25.5 full garbage trucks.
Cutting them down
In 1892, the Kings River Lumber Co. began logging the Converse Basin, home to giant sequoias with trunk diameters of 15 to 20 feet. The wood was sent down the 54-mile Sanger flume to get to a railroad. The wood of sequoias is considered brittle, and few logs made it to the mill. Logging stopped in the 1920s.
Big growth
As sequoias grow, they produce about 40 cubic feet of wood each year, approximately equal to the volume of a tree that’s 50 feet tall and 1 foot in diameter. The General Sherman tree has enough wood to build approximately 120 average-size homes.
Rooting them on
Most of the giant sequoia’s root system is made up of tiny, threadlike feeders that spread out from the larger roots near the trunk. None of the large roots is more than 2 1/2 or 3 feet in diameter. The entire system is within 5 feet of the soil surface.
Tiny beginnings
The giant sequoia begins with tiny seeds: 91,000 make up a pound.
The largest giant sequoias by trunk volume in cubic feet:General Sherman: 52,508General Grant: 46,608President: 45,148Lincoln: 44,471Stagg: 42,557
The park
Sequoia National Park has 52 developed campgrounds, hiking on more than 1,147 miles of trails including 47 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, over 314,448 acres of wilderness, 222 miles of wild and scenic rivers, world-class whitewater rapids, 158 ponds and lakes, boating, fishing, biking and horseback riding.
The tallest peak in the contiguous U.S. is in the park, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet.
There is little cellphone reception in the park.
You can learn more about Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks here.
Sources: National Park Service, California Department of Parks and Recreation, monumentaltrees.com, savetheredwoods.org, history.com
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