47 Fun Facts About Kings Canyon National Park

Kings Canyon National Park lies in which US state?

California. The park began in 1890 as four square miles around one sequoia grove, and the canyon it is now named for stayed outside its borders until 1965.

A giant sequoia felled in 1891 for museums in New York and London left a Kings Canyon stump named for which writer?

Mark Twain. The trunk section was split into pieces, hauled out by wagon and sent east by rail, and a slice 16 feet across still stands in London's Natural History Museum.

Which president signed the 1890 law creating General Grant National Park, the small reserve that grew into Kings Canyon?

Benjamin Harrison. The clause creating it was tacked onto another park's bill at the last minute, and historians have never established who wrote it.

Which president signed the bill that enlarged General Grant National Park and renamed it Kings Canyon?

Franklin D. Roosevelt. To win over valley irrigators who still hoped for reservoirs, his bill left the canyon floor and Tehipite Valley outside the new park.

Kings Canyon's Grant Tree was thought the world's largest until 1931, when measurements favoured which rival?

General Sherman. Grant's huge base had made it look the bigger tree, but Sherman's trunk held more wood, and trunk volume has been the usual way to rank giant trees ever since.

In 1926 Kings Canyon's General Grant Tree was officially given which national title?

Nation's Christmas Tree. The title grew out of a Christmas Day service first held at its foot in 1925, and a 'Trek to the Tree' ceremony still gathers there every December.

In 1956 President Eisenhower declared Kings Canyon's General Grant Tree what, the only living thing with that status?

A National Shrine. Congress dedicated the tree to the men and women of the armed forces who died for their country, making a living sequoia one of the nation's war memorials.

Which Confederate general's name did park officials stop using in 2020 for a giant sequoia in Kings Canyon's Grant Grove?

Robert E. Lee. A Confederate lieutenant is believed to have named the tree around 1875, in the same grove as the giant honouring Lee's wartime opponent, Ulysses S. Grant.

Which mountain man became the first American known to reach the Kings River, while trapping beaver in 1827?

Jedediah Smith. Ordered out by the region's Mexican governor, he instead wandered north through the Central Valley, trapping beaver on its rivers as he went.

What followed when scientists set test fires in Kings Canyon's largest sequoia grove in 1965?

Thousands of new seedlings germinated. Researchers counted 2,013 sequoia seedlings on the treated plots the next summer and none on the untouched ones, and regular prescribed burns began in 1968.

Which once-vast sequoia grove just outside Kings Canyon was almost entirely logged around the turn of the 20th century?

Converse Basin. Loggers felled some 8,000 giant sequoias there, yet the brittle trunks often shattered as they fell, and much of the wood ended up as shingles and fence posts.

Kings Canyon's Centennial Stump is left from a sequoia felled for an exhibit at an 1876 fair in which city?

Philadelphia. Visitors to the Centennial Exposition are said to have refused to believe the reassembled section came from a single tree, and to have written it off as a hoax.

Kings Canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon; about how far does it drop from rim to river at its deepest?

About 8,000 feet. The deepest stretch is not in the national park at all: it lies just west of the boundary, where Spanish Mountain towers over the river below the meeting of its two main forks.

Which status shields the Kings River's Middle and South Forks from new dams?

Wild and Scenic River. The 1987 law headed off a dam planned at Rodgers Crossing and kept intact what was called the greatest undammed drop of any river in the United States.

Kings Canyon's river was named 'River of the Holy Kings' for whom?

Three Wise Men. The Spanish name, Rio de los Santos Reyes, may well have been given on Epiphany, the feast of the Magi's visit; English speakers later trimmed it to Kings.

What is the only part of the park's vast eastern section reachable by road?

Highway 180 reaches it at the bottom of Kings Canyon, 35 miles beyond the park entrance; it closes in winter.

The highway into Kings Canyon, finished in 1939, was built partly with what labour?

State prison inmates. The road they helped build let ordinary tourists drive to the canyon floor for the first time.

Which city spent decades trying to build hydroelectric dams in Kings Canyon?

It refiled its application repeatedly until 1963; the last dam sites finally joined the park in 1965, killing the idea for good.

Which conservation group backed the 1940 Kings Canyon bill as better than no park, while the National Parks Association fought it?

Sierra Club. Its leaders accepted a park that left out the canyon floor, betting the missing valleys could be added later, and 25 years on Congress did just that.

Which Interior Secretary led the campaign that created Kings Canyon National Park in 1940?

Harold Ickes. He and his aides spent two years on speeches and radio talks around the state, winning over valley farmers who had long preferred the rival Forest Service.

Which photographer's 1938 book of mountain pictures helped persuade Washington to create Kings Canyon National Park?

Ansel Adams. He also argued the case before Congress, yet the government hired him only in 1941, the year after the park was created, to photograph national parks for a set of murals.

Which 1891 magazine article by John Muir made the case for protecting Kings Canyon?

A Rival of the Yosemite. Its last section called for 'another great national park' around the canyon, a wish that took Congress almost fifty years to grant.

Muir held that glaciers carved valleys like Kings Canyon; the state geologist said the most famous such valley formed how?

The floor suddenly sank. That was his account of Yosemite Valley, a cataclysm in which the bottom simply dropped; he waved Muir away as an amateur, but later geologists found the amateur's glaciers nearer the truth.

Which peak is the highest point in Kings Canyon National Park?

North Palisade. Admirers twice tried to rename it after people, first a local stockman and then the scientist David Starr Jordan, but neither name stuck.

Through Kings Canyon, the John Muir Trail shares its path with which far longer hiking route?

Pacific Crest Trail. The Muir trail came first: its last link was finished in 1938, and when Congress created the border-to-border route in 1968 it simply followed the older path here.

Which animals multiplied so fast in Kings Canyon and Sequoia that rangers shot nearly 900 of them between 1955 and 1965?

Mule deer. With their natural predators gone and campers hand-feeding them, the herds stripped whole hillsides of brush, and the cull went on until 1970.

What name is given to the ridges of glacial rubble, four of which John Muir traced across Kings Canyon's floor?

Moraines. The river glides quietly through the meadows between them, Muir wrote, then leaps into rapids wherever it has to cross one.

The 1864 expedition that first mapped Kings Canyon named which famous peak after its chief, the state geologist?

Mount Whitney. Two of its members set out to climb it, reached the top of the wrong mountain, and saw the real one still higher to the south; it went unclimbed for nine more years.

Which pass into Kings Canyon is named, via a mine, for the Union warship that sank the raider Alabama?

Kearsarge Pass. Southern sympathisers had named the nearby Alabama Hills for the raider, so Unionist miners replied by naming their claim, and later the pass, for the ship that sank it.

The Army troopers who guarded General Grant National Park in 1903 were known by which nickname?

Buffalo Soldiers. That summer they kept poachers and trespassing herds out of the two parks they patrolled, doing a ranger's work thirteen years before the Park Service existed.

Which Native people crossed the mountains centuries ago and settled the foothills by the Kings River, becoming the Monache?

Owens Valley Paiute. The clue is language: the Monache and their kin east of the crest still spoke dialects of one tongue, a sign that the two groups had not been apart for long.

Mount Huxley, Mount Spencer and Mount Haeckel stand around a high Kings Canyon basin named for which scientific idea?

Evolution. Theodore Solomons named the peaks in 1895 while exploring a route for a trail along the High Sierra; the John Muir Trail, built later, runs through the basin below them.

Which crisis prompted the money-saving merger of Kings Canyon and Sequoia's management?

World War II. Kings Canyon had run itself for just three years when its administration was folded into its neighbour's in 1943, and after the war nobody separated them again.

Since 2001, Kings Canyon and Sequoia crews have netted which introduced fish out of high lakes to save an endangered frog?

Trout. They were stocked in once-fishless lakes to please anglers and ate the tadpoles of the mountain yellow-legged frog, which bounced back within a few years wherever the fish were cleared.

Which lake between Kings Canyon's two sections began in 1908 as a mill pond for loggers cutting giant sequoias?

Hume Lake. Its dam held logs for the sawmill and fed a flume that floated the cut lumber down to the valley town of Sanger; when logging ended in 1924 the mill pond became a holiday lake.

Which large predator was hunted to extinction in what is now Kings Canyon National Park by the early 1900s?

Grizzly bear. Ranchers shot, trapped and poisoned it for preying on their stock, and what was thought to be the last one in the whole state was seen in neighbouring Sequoia in 1924.

Which endangered animals were flown by helicopter into the Sequoia and Kings Canyon backcountry in 2014 to found a new herd?

Bighorn sheep. Fourteen were netted east of the crest and flown over it; diseases caught from domestic flocks in the 1800s had done most to wipe the wild herds out.

What is the name of the show cave in the deepest part of Kings Canyon, just outside the park boundary?

Boyden Cavern. It is hollowed out of a band of marble in the canyon wall, and it stayed shut for four years after the Rough Fire swept through the gorge in 2015.

Where does the Kings River, the stream that carved Kings Canyon, finally come to an end?

Tulare Lake basin. The lake there was once the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi; irrigation diversions dried it up, though in very wet years it still comes back.

Historians suspect which railroad of quietly steering the 1890 bill that created Kings Canyon's forerunner, General Grant National Park?

Southern Pacific. Its local attorney, for whom a meadow on the canyon floor is named, later took credit for the park; the motive may have been to squeeze rival lumbermen out of the big trees.

Highway 180 climbs east to Kings Canyon's main entrance from which Central Valley city?

Fresno. No road reaches the park from the east at all: along this stretch the mountain crest runs for more than 175 miles without a single highway crossing it.

Which dam in the foothills below Kings Canyon now stores most of the Kings River's flow for valley farms?

Pine Flat Dam. Its reservoir can hold about two-thirds of the river's yearly runoff, which is why valley irrigators stopped needing the dam sites inside the canyon.

Mount Clarence King in Kings Canyon honours a member of the 1864 mapping party who became the first director of which agency?

U.S. Geological Survey. King joined the party at 22, and his tall-tale account of its climbs, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, has stayed in print ever since.

About how many people visited Kings Canyon's forerunner, General Grant National Park, in the stagecoach summer of 1907?

About 1,100. The way in was a rough wagon road served by a stagecoach; in 1913, the year the first well-graded road reached the park, nearly 2,800 came.

The 41-mile Rae Lakes Loop, Kings Canyon's best-known backpacking trip, reaches its high point at which pass?

Glen Pass. At 11,978 feet it can stay snowbound into July, and the loop is so popular that hikers may camp only one night at each of the lakes just below it.

Which backcountry waterfall drops in several tiers into Kings Canyon's remote Tehipite Valley?

Silver Spray Falls. An 1883 guidebook explained the name: on the last of its three drops the water breaks apart into a fine silvery spray before it reaches the bottom.

Which Army captain, born into slavery, ran Sequoia and General Grant national parks in 1903 as the first Black park superintendent?

Charles Young. In one summer his men built more road than the three seasons before them combined, and wagons rolled up to the big trees of the Giant Forest for the first time.