Kings Canyon National Park Trivia
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47 free Kings Canyon National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Kings Canyon National Park trivia quiz covers the wilder, quieter neighbour of Sequoia and Yosemite in California's southern Sierra Nevada, where the Kings River has cut one of the deepest canyons in North America beneath fourteen-thousand-foot peaks. Questions cover Grant Grove and the General Grant Tree, the Redwood Mountain Grove, Cedar Grove and Zumwalt Meadow, the glaciers that carved the U-shaped valleys, the Palisades, the John Muir Trail, and the bears, bighorn and trout that live there. The history side runs from the Paiute and Yokuts through the loggers of Converse Basin, the 1864 Whitney Survey, John Muir's Rival of the Yosemite, Benjamin Harrison's 1890 General Grant National Park, the Buffalo Soldiers, Ansel Adams and Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt's 1940 expansion, and the half-century fight to keep Los Angeles from damming the canyon. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a car game on Highway 180 or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Yosemite and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kings Canyon National Park lies in which US state?
California
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.
Q 02A giant sequoia felled in 1891 for museums in New York and London left a Kings Canyon stump named for which writer?
Mark Twain
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.
Q 03Which president signed the 1890 law creating General Grant National Park, the small reserve that grew into Kings Canyon?
Benjamin Harrison
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.
Q 04Which president signed the bill that enlarged General Grant National Park and renamed it Kings Canyon?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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.
Q 05Kings Canyon's Grant Tree was thought the world's largest until 1931, when measurements favoured which rival?
General Sherman
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.
Q 06In 1926 Kings Canyon's General Grant Tree was officially given which national title?
Nation's Christmas Tree
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.
Q 07In 1956 President Eisenhower declared Kings Canyon's General Grant Tree what, the only living thing with that status?
A National Shrine
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.
Q 08Which Confederate general's name did park officials stop using in 2020 for a giant sequoia in Kings Canyon's Grant Grove?
Robert E. Lee
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.
Q 09Which mountain man became the first American known to reach the Kings River, while trapping beaver in 1827?
Jedediah Smith
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.
Q 10What followed when scientists set test fires in Kings Canyon's largest sequoia grove in 1965?
Thousands of new seedlings germinated
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.
Q 11Which once-vast sequoia grove just outside Kings Canyon was almost entirely logged around the turn of the 20th century?
Converse Basin
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.
Q 12Kings Canyon's Centennial Stump is left from a sequoia felled for an exhibit at an 1876 fair in which city?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 13Kings Canyon is deeper than the Grand Canyon; about how far does it drop from rim to river at its deepest?
About 8,000 feet
Q 21Which photographer's 1938 book of mountain pictures helped persuade Washington to create Kings Canyon National Park?
Ansel Adams
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.
Q 22Which 1891 magazine article by John Muir made the case for protecting Kings Canyon?
A Rival of the Yosemite
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.
Q 23Muir held that glaciers carved valleys like Kings Canyon; the state geologist said the most famous such valley formed how?
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.
Q 14Which status shields the Kings River's Middle and South Forks from new dams?
Wild and Scenic River
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.
Q 15Kings Canyon's river was named 'River of the Holy Kings' for whom?
Three Wise Men
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.
Q 16What is the only part of the park's vast eastern section reachable by road?
Cedar Grove
Highway 180 reaches it at the bottom of Kings Canyon, 35 miles beyond the park entrance; it closes in winter.
Q 17The highway into Kings Canyon, finished in 1939, was built partly with what labour?
State prison inmates
State prison inmates. The road they helped build let ordinary tourists drive to the canyon floor for the first time.
Q 18Which city spent decades trying to build hydroelectric dams in Kings Canyon?
Los Angeles
It refiled its application repeatedly until 1963; the last dam sites finally joined the park in 1965, killing the idea for good.
Q 19Which conservation group backed the 1940 Kings Canyon bill as better than no park, while the National Parks Association fought it?
Sierra Club
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.
Q 20Which Interior Secretary led the campaign that created Kings Canyon National Park in 1940?
Harold Ickes
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.
The floor suddenly sank
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.
Q 24Which peak is the highest point in Kings Canyon National Park?
North Palisade
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.
Q 25Through Kings Canyon, the John Muir Trail shares its path with which far longer hiking route?
Pacific Crest Trail
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.
Q 26Which animals multiplied so fast in Kings Canyon and Sequoia that rangers shot nearly 900 of them between 1955 and 1965?
Mule deer
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.
Q 27What name is given to the ridges of glacial rubble, four of which John Muir traced across Kings Canyon's floor?
Moraines
Moraines. The river glides quietly through the meadows between them, Muir wrote, then leaps into rapids wherever it has to cross one.
Q 28The 1864 expedition that first mapped Kings Canyon named which famous peak after its chief, the state geologist?
Mount Whitney
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.
Q 29Which pass into Kings Canyon is named, via a mine, for the Union warship that sank the raider Alabama?
Kearsarge Pass
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.
Q 30The Army troopers who guarded General Grant National Park in 1903 were known by which nickname?
Buffalo Soldiers
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.