Sequoia National Park Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Sequoia National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Sequoia National Park trivia quiz covers America's second national park, the 1890 preserve in California's southern Sierra Nevada that holds the biggest tree on Earth and the highest peak in the lower 48. It ranges across the General Sherman Tree and the Giant Forest, Moro Rock, Tunnel Log, Crystal Cave, Tokopah Falls, Mineral King and Mount Whitney, plus the bears, fishers and 270 caves that fill the backcountry. There is plenty of history too: the Monache and Yokuts peoples, homesteader Hale Tharp's hollow-log cabin, the socialist Kaweah Colony that renamed a tree for Karl Marx, Benjamin Harrison's 1890 park act, the Buffalo Soldiers who policed the park under Captain Charles Young, the Sierra Club's fight to keep Disney out of Mineral King, and the 2021 fire that had rangers wrapping General Sherman in foil. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a Generals Highway car game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Yosemite, Redwood and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Giant sequoias are the world's most massive trees, but which of their close relatives is the tallest?
Coast redwood
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.
Q 02Which national park adjoins Sequoia to the north and is administered together with it?
Kings Canyon
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.
Q 03Sequoia became a national park in 1890, making it America's second-oldest after which park?
Yellowstone
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.
Q 04Which president signed the 1890 law creating Sequoia National Park?
Benjamin Harrison
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.
Q 05What is the name of the largest known living tree on Earth by volume, which grows in Sequoia National Park?
General Sherman
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.
Q 06Sequoia's biggest tree is named after a general from which war?
The American Civil 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.
Q 07In the 1880s a utopian socialist colony gave Sequoia's biggest tree the name of which thinker?
Karl Marx
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.
Q 08Giant sequoias can live more than 3,000 years, but which California tree lives even longer, past 4,500?
Bristlecone pine
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.
Q 09In January 2006 Sequoia's biggest tree lost what, a piece over six feet thick and 100 feet long?
A side branch
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.
Q 10How did firefighters protect Sequoia's biggest tree from the KNP Complex Fire in September 2021?
Wrapped its base in foil
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.
Q 11Which grove in Sequoia National Park holds more of the world's largest trees than any other?
Giant Forest
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.
Q 12What is the highest point in the contiguous United States, which stands on Sequoia National Park's eastern edge?
Mount Whitney
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.
Q 13Which Sequoia National Park attraction has let cars pass since 1938, a year after a giant sequoia fell across the road?
Tunnel Log
Q 21Which famous naturalist stayed in settler Hale Tharp's hollow-log cabin in Sequoia and called it a 'noble den'?
John Muir
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.
Q 22The Monache of Sequoia's foothills pounded which staple food in bedrock mortar holes?
Acorns
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.
Q 23Why did giant sequoias turn out to be poor timber trees?
They splinter easily when felled
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.
Q 14Which granite dome in the centre of Sequoia National Park is climbed by a stairway built in 1931?
Moro Rock
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.
Q 15Which New Deal agency's young men built Sequoia's campgrounds and trails?
Civilian Conservation Corps
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.
Q 16Which is the only cave in Sequoia National Park that is open to the public?
Crystal
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.
Q 17The sequoia's name is often said to honour Sequoyah, who invented a writing system for which nation?
Cherokee
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.
Q 18Most of the caves in Sequoia National Park are dissolved out of which rock?
Marble
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.
Q 19Which huge bird, which once nested in hollows high in Sequoia's big trees, was seen over the park again in 2020?
California condor
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.
Q 20Which officer, the third African American graduate of West Point, led the Buffalo Soldiers in Sequoia?
Charles Young
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.
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.
Q 24Which company's planned ski resort at Mineral King did the Sierra Club fight before the valley joined Sequoia National Park?
Walt Disney
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.
Q 25Which sequoia-rimmed meadow in Sequoia National Park marks the western end of the High Sierra Trail?
Crescent
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.
Q 26Which animal vanished from California after 1922, when the last one killed was shot in Sequoia's home county?
Grizzly bear
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.
Q 27To save which endangered animals have crews netted non-native trout out of high lakes in Sequoia's wilderness?
Yellow-legged frogs
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.
Q 28Which town sits just outside Sequoia National Park's southern entrance at Ash Mountain?
Three Rivers
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.
Q 29Which road links Sequoia's main grove to Grant Grove in the neighbouring park?
Generals Highway
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.
Q 30Which 1,200-foot waterfall is reached by an easy walk from one of Sequoia's main campgrounds?
Tokopah Falls
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.