Sequoia National Park – Tulare County CA

RATING: ♦♦♦♦

We took a shuttle from the town of Visalia near our campground up to Sequoia National Park. The drive took a little over two hours, mostly uphill on a narrow, twisty mountain road that sometimes had guardrails and sometimes didn’t. It was a little scary, but the views were spectacular!

As we climbed the mountain to the higher elevations, we started to see the sequoia trees here and there in the forest. They were easy to spot because of their enormous size and cinnamon color. They stood out so much that it looked like we were entering another world. Tolkien’s ents came to mind.

The shuttle bus dropped us off at the Giant Forest Museum, where a big beautiful ent named the Sentinel greeted us. We have a picture of David sitting on a park bench in front of the Sentinel. He is dwarfed by the size of the tree, and this is not the largest sequoia in the park. The largest sequoia is the Sherman Tree.

After exploring the museum, we hopped on a park shuttle destined for the Sherman Tree Trail. The paved trail meandered through a grove of giant sequoia trees to the base of the Sherman Tree, considered the largest living organism on earth.

It is estimated to be about 2,000 years old. That makes it only a middle-age giant sequoia, as some others are believed to be more than 3,220 years old. Nearly all the old trees have fire scars at the base of their trunks, some large enough to stand up in.

While the giant sequoia is not the tallest nor the widest tree on earth, it is the world’s largest in total mass. It grows naturally in only one place, the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. It is often confused with the taller Redwoods that grow primarily along the northern California coast.

We visited other areas of the park, had lunch at the Lodgepole Visitor Center, then took the shuttle back down the mountain to Visalia. We just touched on a tiny bit of this wonderful national park. There was so much more to see, but this was just a quick day trip for us.

Fun facts:  1) The highest point in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, is located in the park. 2) Kings Canyon NP and Sequoia NP are administered by the National Park Service together as the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. In 1976 UNESCO designated the areas as Sequoia-Kings Canyon Biosphere Reserve. 3) Though many of the giant trees were cut down in the late 1800s, what saved them from total destruction is that the wood is soft and not very useful as lumber.