III The Sequoia and the General Grant National Parks
The Sequoia National Park has a crowded luxuriance of wild flowers. It abounds in varied bird-life and has a number of wild sheep, bears, deer, and other animals. It has lakes, cañons, and glaciated mountains. But the supreme attraction of this and the neighboring General Grant Park is the sequoia or Big Tree. Nowhere else on earth are trees found that are so large or so imposing. In places the Big Trees are attractively mixed with other forest trees. Besides the large aged trees, there are middle-aged ones, young trees, and seedlings.
The General Grant Park has a sequoia that is thirty-five feet in diameter. This Park, like the Sequoia, was established principally to preserve Big Trees. Both became National Parks in 1890, chiefly through the efforts of George W. Stewart. The General Grant Park has an area of four square miles, the Sequoia Park of two hundred and thirty-seven square miles.
The proposition to enlarge the Sequoia National Park should meet with early consummation. The region would then embrace about twelve hundred square miles, including the present General Grant and Sequoia Parks and Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the United States, exclusive of Alaska. Near Mount Whitney are a number of other peaks. In fact, the region is the highest and most rugged section of California.
Says Gilbert H. Grosvenor, editor of “The National Geographic Magazine”:—
Switzerland, the playground of Europe, visited annually (until 1915) by more than one hundred thousand Americans, cannot compare in attractiveness with the High Sierra of central California. Nothing in the Alps can rival the famous Yosemite Valley, which is as unique as the Grand Cañon. The view from the summit of Mount Whitney surpasses that from any of the peaks of Switzerland. There are no cañons in Switzerland equal to those of the Kern and the King Rivers, which contain scores of waterfalls and roaring streams, any one of which in Europe would draw thousands of visitors annually. Many of the big yellow and red pines, of the juniper and cedar, eclipse the trees of Switzerland as completely as these pines are eclipsed by the giant redwoods.
And then, as to birds and flowers, the High Sierra so excels the Alps that there is no comparison. Never will the writer forget the melodies of the birds and the luxuriance of the meadows passed in the marches from Redwood Meadow to Mineral King, and then up over Franklin Pass; the fields of blue, red, yellow, orange, white, and purple flowers, all graceful and fragrant, or the divine dignity of the great Siberian Plateau, nearly eleven thousand feet above the sea, and yet carpeted from end to end with blue lupine and tiny flowers.
From the educational point of view, the High Sierra so surpasses the Alps that again no comparison can be made.
Magnificent is the King’s River Cañon. The Kern River Cañon is seven thousand feet deep; this is equal, if not superior, to the depth of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. Here is the celebrated Tehipitee Dome. There are numerous lakes, streams, waterfalls, and meadows. This was the original home of the golden trout. Besides the King’s and Kern Rivers, there is the Kaweah.
The glaciation of this region is on a stupendous scale and is of extraordinary interest. The peculiar topography, the heavy snowfall, and the character of the rocks all combined to cause the Ice King to execute wonderful works in this Park and to leave behind a splendid record. From the summit of this high region one looks into Death Valley, less than one hundred miles away, which is the lowest point in the United States, a section of it being three hundred to four hundred feet below sea-level. This region includes the southern extension of the High Sierra in California, is near the Nevada line, and is about one hundred miles north of Los Angeles.
Clarence King, the distinguished geologist and first Director of the United States Geological Survey, had a number of mountain-climbing experiences in this Greater Sequoia region. These are tellingly related in that classic volume, “Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.” John Muir also wrote of this region, and it seems fitting that this enlarged reservation should be called the “Muir National Park.”
Here the skies and the weather are great changing attractions, and the big wild folk are alert neighbors. Here are forests made up of trees each of which is an heroic giant! Here the Ice King left vast and splendid stories. Here is perhaps the deepest gorge in this round world, and here the highest peak within the bounds of the States of the Union—a peak that commands vast and varied scenes. The streams and lakes are of the greatest. The variety of wild flowers is probably not equaled in any other park or territory. The birds, too, are numerously and abundantly represented.
If I were sentenced to end my days in a National Park of my choosing, without the least hesitation I should choose the region now proposed for the Greater Sequoia or Muir Park.
The Big Trees
The General Sherman is the largest tree on earth, and it may be the oldest living object that has a place in the sun. It is thirty-six and one-half feet in diameter and two hundred and eighty feet high. Nearly as large are the General Grant and the Grizzly Giant. A number of veteran sequoias are more than thirty feet in diameter and nearly three hundred feet high. Many are more than twenty feet in diameter, and thousands have a diameter of ten feet or more.
The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is scattered in thirty-two groves along the western slopes of the Sierra for a distance of two hundred and sixty miles. Most of the trees are between the altitudes of five thousand and eight thousand feet. There are gaps of miles between groves. The southern extension has a continuous forest for seventy miles, except where it is cut in two by cañons, and it contains a majority of all Big Trees. There are three Big-Tree groves in the Yosemite National Park, one in the General Grant, and twelve in the Sequoia. One of these twelve is the famous Giant Forest.
The Sequoia and General Grant National Parks have more than a million Big Trees. Of these, more than twelve thousand are ten or more feet in diameter. A few of these trees are upwards of three hundred feet high, but the majority are about two hundred and fifty feet.
Galen Clark, who made a long and careful study of the Big Trees, expressed the opinion that the Grizzly Giant was at least six thousand years old. A number may be four thousand or more years of age, but the majority probably are less than three thousand. Careful counts of the annual rings of trees that have been felled show that a number of these had lived more than three thousand years. One had more than four thousand annual rings. W. L. Jepson, author of “The Trees of California,” believes that the general tendency is to exaggerate the age of the living Big Trees.
These trees bear seeds each year. In a fruitful year a Big Tree may produce one million seeds. These are exceedingly small and light. The tree blooms in late winter, while the earth is still covered with snow. The flowers are pale green and pale yellow. The cones are bright green and are about two and one-half inches in length. They shed their seeds as soon as they are ripened, but the cones sometimes cling to the trees for months. If the seeds alight on freshly upturned soil or soil recently burned over, they usually sprout and grow vigorously. They do best in the sunlight. But if the seeds fall upon a grass- or trash-covered forest floor, they fail to sprout.
With branches nearly to the earth, the outline of a young tree is that of a slender pyramid. As the tree ages, the lower branches fall off. In middle-aged trees, the trunk commonly is free of branches from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. The tiptop of aged trees usually is a dead snag, surrounded by living, up-curved side branches from the trunk. The original tops of nearly all old trees have been smashed by lightning.
Usually in young trees the bark is almost purplish; in old ones it is cinnamon-color. This bark is fire-resisting, is from one to two feet thick, and is good protection to the vitals of the tree. The roots are short, but the base of the trunk is heavily, artistically buttressed.
Living or dead, the Big Tree has extraordinary durability. It has exceptional vitality and recuperative power. Its long life probably is due to the fact that it is almost immune from insect pests, the most deadly enemies of all other kinds of trees. Men, fire, and lightning are the worst enemies of the Big Tree. Most of the old ones have had their heads shattered by lightning again and again, but they still insist on living and will produce a new top even though the old one is entirely smashed off. These trees appear to be almost immortal. Unless they starve or meet a violent death, they live on and on.
John Muir says that the wood in the Big Trees has an endurance almost equal to that of granite, and gives the following illustration. He cut a piece of sound wood from the trunk of a fallen monarch that had been lying upon the earth several hundred years. In falling, the trunk of this Big Tree was cracked across in a number of places. Into these cracks fire ate its way each time a forest fire swept the locality. Each of these fires probably was separated from the following one by a number of years, and it probably took a great many burns to cut this slow-burning wood into sections. But at last this was done. Between the ends of two of these sections a fir tree took root and grew. After all these years, and after the fir tree had lived three hundred and eighty years, the sections of the Big Tree still lay upon the ground, apparently as sound as the day the tree fell.
All Big-Tree groves appear to have gone through forest fires. It is probable that most of these groves have been repeatedly fire-swept. Many of the trees show fire-scars that cannot be entirely healed for centuries.
The Big Tree has been called the noblest of a noble race. Its enormous size, its excellent proportions, its serenity, its steadfastness, its age, make it the most impressive living object. John Muir, in commenting on the imperishable nature of the sequoia, says he feels confident that if every one of these trees were to die to-day, numerous monuments of their existence would remain available for the student for more than ten thousand years.
But the Big Tree is not verging toward extinction. Its greatest danger is from general destruction by man. The Big-Tree area has not diminished, but probably has slightly increased in the last few thousand years. Seeds sprout readily and young trees grow vigorously. John Muir thus comments concerning the tree and its distribution:—
The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is Nature’s forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things. It belongs to an ancient stock, as its remains in old rocks show, and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago—the auld lang syne of trees. Once the genus was common, and with many species flourished in the now desolate arctic regions, in the interior of North America, and in Europe, but in long eventful wanderings from climate to climate only two species have survived the hardships they had to encounter.
The Big Trees probably were discovered by General John Bidwell in 1841. John Muir studied them for years, and then gave to the world an accurate account of them.
The Big-Tree groves, he says, are growing in the soil-areas off which the ice first melted at the close of the ice age. The wide gaps between the various sequoia groves were areas occupied by the large and long-enduring glaciers. The topography of the mountains plainly shows that the areas where the groves are were places protected from the ice-flows of the heights. The gaps would naturally have received the main ice-flows from the heights.
In the south the Big-Tree forests are in the areas that were effectively buttressed and shielded from ice-flows. Consequently these areas were early opened at the close of the ice age. The forty-mile-wide gap between the Stanislaus and the Tuolumne Groves was a channel filled with a glacier probably long after the groves to the north and the south started to grow.
Did the sequoia endure the long ice age in these few places where the groves are now growing? The pine, fir, spruce, and other forest species in the Sierra may have been planted with seeds from trees that survived in the south. But as the sequoia is found nowhere else, the question arises, did it survive somewhere near the localities in which it is now growing?
An acquaintance with the Big Trees, an understanding of them, gives us one of the most impressive and lasting ties to be had in nature. These trees ever impress one with a nobility of character. Seen at midday, or at early morning when their lengthened shadow gives strange tones to the scene, or in the serene, strange moonlight, or when, wrapped in restless mist, they loom vast and mysterious, or in a storm, they are ever marvelously steadfast and calm. Long may they live!
At the Big Trees, the first act of Horace Greeley, the celebrated editor, was to take out a pencil and figure on the lumber contents of one. These veteran trees have a higher value.
Lincoln, in his lecture on Niagara Falls, said: “The mere physical fact of Niagara Falls is a very small part of the world’s wonder. Its power to incite reflection and emotion is its greatest charm.” Lincoln might have calculated the mule-power of the Falls if ruined—changed from the higher value of a scenic spectacle to common commercialism. Why tell how many hovels or how many feet of sewer might be constructed out of the Library of Congress; or the number of cobblestones that could be manufactured from the Washington Monument? As well tell the number of forts that might have been built with the marbles and the energy that were put into statuary and the inspiring arts, as to consider or measure Big Trees in lumber terms.
The sequoia is one of the monumental wonders of this round world. It is the oldest settler—the pioneer of pioneers. Each venerable giant numbers his years by centuries. Each was already old when nations of the present were born. Gone and forgotten are the nations that were—gone the flags that waved in the wind when these trees began to cast their shadows.
And it may be—for nations with all their pomp and pride are short-lived—that every flag that now flaunts the sky, that every nation now on earth, will pass out of existence long before these patriarchal trees lie down at last upon the mountains. Some of these trees have already out-lived more than fifty generations of mankind. Some of them are likely to look upon a score or more of passing generations of the human race. These trees might tell a thousand stirring stories to the one possessed by the Sphinx. The Sphinx is of lifeless stone. These trees are alive. They have lived through countless changing scenes. But which shall be accounted the more striking and wonderful, the passing pictures in the centuries they have looked upon, or the moving, changing scenes in the centuries that they are yet to see?
These Big Trees have endured fire, flood, lightning, landslide, gale, drought, and earthquake, but have never hauled down their evergreen banners. They have triumphed over the changes of ten thousand seasons; watched and waved through centuries of sunlight and storm. Countless times the sun has projected a silhouetted shadow of their stupendous plumes against the mountain side. They have worn monumental robes of snow flowers; they have stood silent in the light of thousands of autumn moons; and they are still upon the heights to inspire us with their steadfastness and their splendor.
The landmark and the heritage of the ages are these splendid trees, these immortal evergreens. Their historic lore and unequaled grandeur give them amplitude and poetry enough to kindle and enrich the imagination. Let them live on; they will bless those who make the sacred pilgrimage to see them, and they will be a “choir invisible” to all who simply know that upon the sublime Sierra they still wave grandly.