The Wawona Tunnel Tree: Fame, a Tunnel, and a Fall
Near Wawona, California
At the edge of the Mariposa Grove two miles above Wawona stood one of the most famous trees in the world for nearly ninety years. It was a giant sequoia known as the Wawona Tunnel Tree, and in eighteen eighty one the Washburn family hired a crew to bore a tunnel through its base. The tunnel was six feet wide, seven feet tall, and twenty six feet long.
From that summer onward, stagecoaches and later automobiles could drive through a living tree that was already more than two thousand years old. The tree remained standing and apparently healthy for decades after the tunnel was cut. Whether the boring actually harmed the tree or whether its eventual fall was simply the result of age and snowpack remains a matter of scientific debate.
What is certain is that the winter of nineteen sixty eight to sixty nine brought extraordinary snowfall to the Mariposa Grove. In February of nineteen sixty nine, the Wawona Tunnel Tree fell under a heavy load of snow. The snow load had proved too much.
The stump and the fallen trunk remain where they landed, and visitors can still walk around and over the enormous log. The tunnel that made the tree famous is still visible in the fallen wood, carved by ambitious hoteliers who understood that a tree you could drive through was worth more to them as an attraction than as a living organism.
