Sierra National Forest: Giant Sequoias, the Kings River Canyon, and the Sierra Foothills Miwok

The Sierra National Forest sits between Yosemite to the north and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks to the south, approximately one point three million acres of mid-elevation Sierra terrain that most people drive through without stopping. The forest contains giant sequoia groves outside the national parks, the most significant of which is the McKinley Grove in the Big Creek drainage, a stand of mature sequoias that is old-growth and accessible and not heavily visited.

The Kings River canyon, which bisects the southern portion of the forest, is deeper than the Grand Canyon at its deepest point. The river runs fast and cold through a gorge of polished granite, and the canyon walls rise to heights that the scale of the surrounding landscape makes easy to underestimate until you are standing at the rim looking down.

The Sierra National Forest is the traditional territory of the Western Mono, also known as the Monache, and the Sierra Miwok, who occupied the foothill and mid-elevation zones from the San Joaquin Valley edge to the high country. Their seasonal use of the Sierra was organized around elevational migration: winter in the foothills, summer in the high meadows, following the elk and deer and the ripening of different food plants as altitude changed the growing season. That pattern was disrupted by the gold rush settlement of the foothill zones in the eighteen fifties and by the reservation system of the eighteen sixties and seventies.

The groves and the canyon are the forest's showpieces. The watershed they sit in, and the people who managed it before anyone else, are the context.