The Grizzly Giant: Two Thousand Seven Hundred Years in One Tree
Near Wawona, California
In the Mariposa Grove two miles above Wawona stands a tree that may be the oldest living thing in Yosemite. The Grizzly Giant, as it has been called since the eighteen sixties, is a giant sequoia estimated to be somewhere between two thousand five hundred and two thousand seven hundred years old. It was already ancient when the Roman Empire fell.
It was middle-aged when Columbus crossed the Atlantic. By any reckoning it is among the oldest organisms on this continent. The tree is not the tallest in the grove, and it is not the widest.
What makes it remarkable is the combination of age and the visible evidence of everything it has survived. Its enormous lower limbs jut out at dramatic angles, twisted by millennia of wind and snow. The bark is deeply furrowed and fire-scarred, carrying the marks of perhaps a hundred fires over three thousand years.
The largest lower branch is roughly six feet in diameter at its own base. A full-grown coast redwood tree would fit inside the Grizzly Giant's trunk. Scientists estimate it holds somewhere around two million pounds of living wood.
It was named the Grizzly Giant because early visitors thought its gnarled, scarred profile looked like the stance of a grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs. The name stuck because nothing else quite captures the quality of age that a three-thousand-year-old tree carries in its bark.
