Hale Tharp and the Hollow Sequoia Cabin
Near Three Rivers, California
The first person of non-Native descent documented to have entered the Giant Forest of giant sequoias lived near Three Rivers and reached the sequoias by following the Kaweah River upstream. His name was Hale Dixon Tharp, a cattle rancher who arrived in the Three Rivers area in the late eighteen fifties and made friends with Wukchumni people living in the mountains above. The Wukchumni knew the giant sequoias well and took Tharp to see them in eighteen fifty eight, making him the first non-Native person on record to enter what would become Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park.
Tharp subsequently used the forest as a summer grazing range for his cattle and built a simple shelter inside a fallen sequoia log, a practice he continued for many summers. That fallen log, with its rough board door and simple furnishings, still exists in Sequoia National Park as Tharp's Log Cabin. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is among the oldest structures built by European Americans in the Sequoia and Kings Canyon area.
Visiting it requires a several-mile hike, but the cabin is remarkably well preserved. The sense of what it would have been like to sleep inside a three-thousand-year-old tree on a summer night in the high Sierra is not easily shaken. Tharp lived in Three Rivers until his death, having watched the forests around him transformed from wilderness to national park in his own lifetime.
