Sequoia National Forest: The Trail of a Hundred Giants and the Trees Outside the Park

Most visitors to the giant sequoias go to the national parks. Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon National Park together protect the largest trees by volume on earth, including General Sherman, which at an estimated fifty-two thousand cubic feet is the largest single tree by volume ever documented. But the national parks hold only a portion of the giant sequoia groves. Roughly half of the remaining old-growth sequoia trees, in dozens of separate grove clusters, grow in the Sequoia National Forest, on land managed by the Forest Service rather than the Park Service.

The Trail of a Hundred Giants in the Long Meadow Grove, in the southern Sequoia National Forest, is a mile-and-a-half loop through a stand of mature giant sequoias that includes trees over two hundred feet tall and twenty feet in diameter. It is accessible, free, and often less crowded than the corresponding park trails. The trees are not dramatically smaller than those in the national parks. They are simply on a different piece of federal land with a different management mandate.

The distinction matters because the national forest designation does not carry the same level of protection as a national park. Sequoia National Forest has a history of timber harvesting in its lower and mid-elevation zones, and the question of how to manage fire in the sequoia groves has been contested for decades. Giant sequoias require fire to reproduce. Their cones open in the heat of a burn, releasing seeds onto a freshly cleared, mineral-rich soil. The policy of fire suppression that dominated federal land management through most of the twentieth century worked against sequoia reproduction in the groves where it was most aggressively applied.

The trees you walk among are the survivors of multiple management regimes. That they are here at all is partly good fortune.