Sequoia National Forest and Giant Sequoia National Monument

The Sequoia National Forest is located in California. It includes three ranger districts: the Hume Lake Ranger District, the Western Divide Ranger District, and the Kern River Ranger District.

Sequoia National Park is a protected part of the forest. It is the second-oldest national park in the United States and is under the jurisdiction of the US Forest Service.

The Giant Sequoia National Monument encompasses 328,315 acres within the Sequoia National Forest. It is managed by the US Forest Service. President Bill Clinton designated it a permanently protected area in 2000.

Sequoia National Forest

The Sequoia National Forest is one of nineteen national forests in California. The area is in the High Sierra in the southern reaches of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The range developed when a subduction zone pushed volcanic rock from deep beneath the surface. The granite peaks rise to more than twelve thousand feet and are laced with feldspar, mica, and quartz. The terrain features canyons carved by glaciers, white-water rapids, and several lakes. Limestone caves, including the Crystal Cave, lie beneath the park. The Sequoia National Forest is named for thirty-three groves of Sequoiadendron giganteum, the giant sequoia tree, that it contains. The species was named by French botanist Joseph Decaisne in 1854.

Humans have lived and worked in the forest for more than nine thousand years. Several hundred years ago, Western Mono Native Americans lived in the area seasonally and used trade routes through the mountains.

Sequoia trees lived during the Jurassic period. They can live for more than three thousand years and can grow more than two hundred feet tall. More than eight hundred of the trees in the forest have diameters of ten feet, with several measuring twenty feet around. The Yosemite Native Americans called the sequoia wawona, which imitates the sound of the northern spotted owl that they regarded as the guardian of the forest. Tribes along the Tule River called the trees toos-pung-ish or hea-mi-withic.

Only Native Americans knew the area and about the giant trees until the nineteenth century. The first Euramericans to record a sighting of a giant sequoia were hunters in 1833, but the information was not widely reported. Another visitor saw the trees soon after but did not publicize the encounter. In 1852, a hunter by the name of Augustus T. Dowd was following a bear in the mountains and found a sequoia grove. When he met some miners nearby, he told them about the giant trees, but they would not believe him until he showed them the sequoias.

The tree Dowd found became known as the Discovery Tree. It was widely reported, and loggers investigated the area for timber operations. A year after Dowd found the Discovery Tree, a five-man crew spent twenty-two days cutting it down. They counted the rings and discovered the tree was 1,300 years old. They smoothed the stump top and used it as a dance floor. News of the amazing groves of giant trees fascinated Americans on the East Coast. Other ancient sequoias were soon cut down so disbelieving easterners could see evidence of these marvels. A sequoia called the Mark Twain Tree was cut in 1891, and a slice of the trunk was sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for exhibit. Another slice traveled to London and was displayed at the British Museum of Natural History.

Euramericans began settling in the forest during the 1860s. Hale Tharp famously carved a cabin into a fallen sequoia tree and used it as a base for cattle ranching. Tharp's Cabin is the oldest park structure open to visitors. Farms and timber mills were established. The wood of the trees was difficult to harvest, however. It was soft and brittle, and often broke into pieces when the trees fell. It was too soft to be used for construction material. The wood, which resists rotting, was used to make poles for vineyards. Logging of giant sequoias largely stopped by the 1920s, but smaller, younger trees were still harvested until the 1980s.

Naturalist John Muir made the public aware of the forest and its ecological importance. He pushed to preserve the forest from logging. Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, succeeded in having the Sequoia National Park established in 1890. The park later grew several times with the addition of more forested areas. The modern park is 404,063 acres.

Visitors to the park can drive down a road that cuts through a sequoia called the Auto Log. Tunnel Log is a hollowed-out trunk through which visitors can drive.

The Boole Tree in Converse Basin is one of the largest trees in the world, and the largest growing on US National Forest System land.

The Giant Sequoia National Monument

The Giant Sequoia National Monument consists of two portions of forest. The northern portion is near Dunlap, California, on the Hume Lake Ranger District. The southern portion is east of Springville, California, on the Western Divide Ranger District.

The monument contains half of all the world's sequoia redwoods. Most of the rest of the trees are in the national park. President George H. W. Bush signed a proclamation on July 14, 1992, to protect the sequoia groves from commercial logging operations. A tree in the Freeman Creek Sequoia Grove in the national monument was named for President Bush.

President Bill Clinton established the national monument in 2000, giving it permanent protection. He cited the diversity of plant species, rare plants, and plant communities.

The national monument is one of the last ranges of the Pacific fisher in California, and it is home to American martens, great gray owls, peregrine falcons, spotted owls, and other creatures. The California condor nests in cavities of giant sequoia trees; without the trees, the birds would have to nest in cliff faces. The last pair of condors breeding in the wild was found in the monument.

The monument contains archaeological evidence of early human settlements. These include rock shelters, village sites, petroglyphs, and pictographs.

Bibliography

"About the Forest." Sequoia National Forest, www.fs.usda.gov/main/sequoia/about-forest. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

Eldredge, Ward. Sequoia National Park. Arcadia, 2008.

"Freeman Creek Grove and the George Bush Tree." Sierra Nevada Geotourism, www.sierranevadageotourism.org/content/freeman-creek-grove-and-the-george-bush-tree/siea23e7b3325782095f. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

"The Giant Sequoia National Monument." Sequoia National Forest, www.fs.usda.gov/detail/sequoia/home/?cid=stelprdb5394941. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

"History and Culture." Sequoia National Forest, www.fs.usda.gov/main/sequoia/learning/history-culture. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

"History of the Giant Sequoia." Monumental Trees, www.monumentaltrees.com/en/trees/giantsequoia/history/. Accessed 23 Jan. 2025.

White, Mike. Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks: Your Complete Hiking Guide. Wilderness Press, 2012.