50 Fun Facts About Sequoia National Park

Giant sequoias are the world's most massive trees, but which of their close relatives is the tallest?

Coast redwood. It can top 380 feet, partly because it drinks summer fog straight through its leaves, while the bulkier giant sequoia lives inland, high in the mountains.

Which national park adjoins Sequoia to the north and is administered together with it?

Kings Canyon. Created in 1940, it swallowed tiny General Grant National Park, which had been set up in 1890 a week after Sequoia, and the two neighbours are now run as a single unit.

Sequoia became a national park in 1890, making it America's second-oldest after which park?

Yellowstone, created in 1872. Neither park had rangers at first, so the US Army ran them, with cavalry arriving in Yellowstone in 1886 and in Sequoia in 1891.

Which president signed the 1890 law creating Sequoia National Park?

Benjamin Harrison signed it on September 25, 1890, and a week later approved a second act that created two more national parks in the same mountains.

What is the name of the largest known living tree on Earth by volume, which grows in Sequoia National Park?

General Sherman. It is neither the tallest nor the widest tree; it wins on bulk because its trunk barely tapers, staying about 14 feet thick even 180 feet above the ground.

Sequoia's biggest tree is named after a general from which war?

The American Civil War. The name was not always settled: socialist colonists who claimed the forest in the 1880s called the same tree something else, until their colony folded in 1892.

In the 1880s a utopian socialist colony gave Sequoia's biggest tree the name of which thinker?

Karl Marx. The colonists named other giants for their heroes too, but the names did not last: the new park voided their land claims, and by 1892 the colony was gone.

Giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years, but which California tree lives even longer, past 4,500?

Bristlecone pine. Harsh mountain conditions make it grow so slowly that its wood is dense enough to resist rot and insects, and one specimen has passed 4,600 years.

In January 2006 Sequoia's biggest tree lost what, a piece over six feet thick and 100 feet long?

A side branch, torn off in a winter storm. Sequoia limbs tend to fail before the trunk does, and losing this one may have saved the giant by cutting the wind load on its crown.

How did firefighters protect Sequoia's biggest tree from the KNP Complex Fire in September 2021?

Wrapped its base in foil. Crews used the aluminium wrap normally put on buildings to keep flames out of old fire scars at the foot of the trunk, and the tree came through unharmed.

Which grove in Sequoia National Park holds more of the world's largest trees than any other?

Giant Forest. By the 1990s nearly 300 cabins, shops and lodge buildings stood in among its big trees, so the Park Service tore them down and moved the lodging elsewhere.

What is the highest point in the contiguous United States, which stands on Sequoia National Park's eastern edge?

Mount Whitney. Geologist Clarence King believed he had made the first ascent in 1871, but he had climbed the wrong mountain, and three local men beat him to the real summit in 1873.

Which Sequoia National Park attraction has let cars pass since 1938, a year after a giant sequoia fell across the road?

Tunnel Log. Rather than clear the fallen giant away, a work crew burned and chopped an arch through it with torches and adzes, the way a dugout canoe is hollowed.

Which granite dome in the centre of Sequoia National Park is climbed by a stairway built in 1931?

Moro Rock. Its designers threaded the stairway along natural ledges and cracks and tinted the concrete to match the granite, so the steps would blend into the dome.

Which New Deal agency's young men built Sequoia's campgrounds and trails?

Civilian Conservation Corps. It hired jobless, unmarried men of 18 to 25 at $30 a month and sent much of that pay straight home, so the relief reached their families too.

Which is the only cave in Sequoia National Park that is open to the public?

Crystal Cave. Two park employees found it in 1918, and its formations are so fragile that the only way in is on a guided tour.

The sequoia's name is often said to honour Sequoyah, who invented a writing system for which nation?

Cherokee. The botanist who coined the tree's name in 1847 never said why he chose it, so the link to Sequoyah, though long assumed, has never been proved.

Most of the caves in Sequoia National Park are dissolved out of which rock?

Marble, which here is old limestone cooked by heat and pressure as the mountains' granite rose beneath it; slightly acidic stream water then dissolved it into caves.

Which huge bird, which once nested in hollows high in Sequoia's big trees, was seen over the park again in 2020?

California condor. Lead poisoning and poaching cut the species so low that by 1987 every wild bird had been taken into captivity; birds bred there were later released.

Which officer, the third African American graduate of West Point, led the Buffalo Soldiers in Sequoia?

Charles Young. In the single summer of 1903 his crews built more road than the three summers before had managed, and by mid-August wagons could reach the big trees for the first time.

Which famous naturalist stayed in settler Hale Tharp's hollow-log cabin in Sequoia and called it a 'noble den'?

John Muir. A stockman he met by chance in a meadow told the hungry walker to follow his horse's tracks to the log and make himself at home, and Muir stayed several nights.

The Monache of Sequoia's foothills pounded which staple food in bedrock mortar holes?

Acorns. The nuts are bitter with tannic acid, so the Monache ground them to flour and soaked it through with water before it was fit to eat.

Why did giant sequoias turn out to be poor timber trees?

They splinter easily when felled. The brittle trunks often shattered on hitting the ground, and that poor value as lumber may be what saved many of the biggest trees from the saw.

Which company's planned ski resort at Mineral King did the Sierra Club fight before the valley joined Sequoia National Park?

Walt Disney. The Sierra Club lost at the Supreme Court in 1972 for lack of standing, yet the years of delay sank the resort, and in 1978 Congress added the valley to the park.

Which sequoia-rimmed meadow in Sequoia National Park marks the western end of the High Sierra Trail?

Crescent Meadow. Before the park existed a rancher drove his cattle up to graze around it each summer; today backpackers set out from it on a walk of about a week across the range.

Which animal vanished from California after 1922, when the last one killed was shot in Sequoia's home county?

Grizzly bear. Less than 75 years after gold was discovered there, settlers had tracked down and killed nearly every one in the state, yet the animal still strides across California's flag.

To save which endangered animals have crews netted non-native trout out of high lakes in Sequoia's wilderness?

Yellow-legged frogs. Trout stocked for anglers ate the tadpoles, and the frogs vanished from most of their range; in lakes where crews removed the fish, they have begun to recover.

Which town sits just outside Sequoia National Park's southern entrance at Ash Mountain?

Three Rivers. Rancher Hale Tharp settled in the district in the 1850s, and it was his Native neighbours who first led him up the canyon to the giant trees.

Which road links Sequoia's main grove to Grant Grove in the neighbouring park?

Generals Highway. It was built to join the parks' two most famous trees, both named for generals, and the mountain road took from 1922 to 1935 to finish.

Which 1,200-foot waterfall is reached by an easy walk from one of Sequoia's main campgrounds?

Tokopah Falls. It is a long cascade fed by melting snow, so it roars in early summer and is usually down to a trickle by autumn.

Gilbert Stanley Underwood, architect of Sequoia's grove museum, also designed which Yosemite hotel?

The Ahwahnee. His Sequoia building began life as a village market and became a museum only in 2001, as the cabins and shops around it were being cleared from among the big trees.

Apple's macOS Sequoia honours the national park; what were Mac systems named after until 2013?

Big cats, from Cheetah to Mountain Lion. In 2013 Apple switched to California places, joking that it did not want to be the first team delayed by a lack of big cats.

Which river, rising near the highest peaks of Sequoia's backcountry, flows south through a long straight canyon toward Bakersfield?

Kern River. Its upper canyon runs almost due north and south for some 25 miles because the river follows an old fault line cut straight through the mountains.

The granite of Sequoia National Park formed about 100 million years ago through what geologic process?

Subduction. As ocean floor slid beneath North America, hot water driven off it melted the rock above, which cooled slowly underground into the speckled granite now exposed.

What carved the U-shaped canyons, hanging valleys and lake basins of Sequoia's high country?

Glaciers. Rivers of ice widened the main canyons into broad troughs like giant bulldozers, leaving side valleys hanging high above, which is why their streams now fall in as waterfalls.

Which endangered animal was returned to Sequoia's Great Western Divide in 2014 after more than a century's absence?

Bighorn sheep. Diseases caught from domestic flocks had helped wipe them from most of the range, so ten ewes and four rams were caught elsewhere in the mountains and set free in the park.

Which small animal helps giant sequoias spread by gnawing the green scales of their cones and shaking the seeds loose?

Douglas squirrel. Sequoia cones can hang closed for twenty years, so this squirrel, a beetle that bores into them and the heat of forest fires are what finally free the seeds.

Which utopian colony set out in the 1880s to log the forest that became Sequoia National Park?

Kaweah Colony. With shovels, crowbars and dynamite its members built an 18-mile wagon road toward the big trees; once their claims were voided, it became the main way into the new park.

In Sequoia National Park, 'the House' and 'the Senate' are the names of what?

Tree clusters on the Congress Trail. Sequoia seedlings survive only on soil a fire has laid bare, so the park has set managed burns in this grove for decades.

Which African American educator has a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park named for him by the Buffalo Soldiers' commander?

Booker T. Washington. The Buffalo Soldiers' captain dedicated the tree to him in 1903, and a century later the park named a sequoia close by for the captain himself.

Why does a fence keep visitors back from the base of Sequoia's biggest tree?

To protect its shallow roots. A giant sequoia has no deep taproot; its roots fan out close to the surface for 100 feet or more and knit with its neighbours' to hold it up.

Which large campground in the park has 214 sites at conifer elevation?

Potwisha, Buckeye Flat and South Fork are the three foothill campgrounds.

Which diseases, caught from settlers, killed hundreds of the Native people of the Sequoia area in the early 1860s?

Smallpox and measles, along with scarlet fever. They struck within a few years of the first settler's arrival, and by 1865 the survivors had been forced out of the district.

What chiefly protects a mature giant sequoia from the heat of a wildfire?

Thick, fibrous bark. It can be more than a foot thick and insulates the living wood, so most fires only char it, leaving the black scars seen on the oldest giants.

What started the KNP Complex Fire, which burned through Sequoia National Park in autumn 2021?

Lightning. A night of thunderstorms on September 9 started two small fires in steep country; they merged into one blaze that burned for months and killed well over a thousand big sequoias.

Sequoia's bears may be brown, cinnamon or even blonde, but all of them belong to which species?

Black bear. The name fits only some coats; what marks these bears is a nose for food keen enough to make them break into cars, hence the steel lockers at every campsite.

Sequoia holds the highest point in the lower 48 states; which other California national park holds North America's lowest?

Death Valley. Its Badwater Basin lies 282 feet below sea level, where the little rain that falls is overwhelmed by evaporation and leaves salt flats nearly 200 square miles across.

The Mineral King valley in Sequoia National Park was named during an 1870s rush for which metal?

Silver. Miners poured in from 1873 expecting riches fit for a king, but the ore would not smelt into bullion, the boom collapsed, and the valley became a place of summer cabins instead.

The Buffalo Soldiers who guarded Sequoia in 1903 rode to the park on horseback from the Presidio in which city?

San Francisco. With no park rangers yet, the Army sent troops from there each summer from 1891, and they spent the season chasing off poachers, illegal loggers and sheep herders.

The seed of a giant sequoia, the most massive tree on Earth, is about the size of what?

An oat flake. A big tree sheds hundreds of thousands of them a year, yet almost none sprout, because a seed must land on bare soil such as a fire leaves behind.