Sequoia National Park was another of the many parks that we visited on our trip to California in June of 2017.  Many of you reading this you have probably heard and seen pictures of these huge sequoia trees out west.  If you have been here you can understand what I am going to describe but if you have not, this is another place I would recommend you make an effort to visit.  

They are HUGE.  We simply do not have tress in the Midwest that approach the scale of these trees.  I have a lot of respect for these trees in regards to their age and the history that has occurred while they stand here and have grown taller and larger.  

From the website visitsequoia.com an excerpt about the famous General Grant Tree:

General Grant Tree

The General Grant Tree is the second-largest tree in the world, standing 267 feet tall, and nearly 29 feet wide at the base.

The General Grant Tree, the second-largest sequoia in the world, is a 3,000-year-old wonder and the centerpiece of Grant Grove in Kings Canyon National Park.

A massive specimen of Sequoiadendron giganteum, General Grant measures almost 270 feet tall and 107 feet around at its base. The tree was named in 1867 to honor Ulysses S. Grant, and was coined “the Nation’s Christmas Tree” by President Calvin Coolidge. It is one of the “biggest” attractions in America’s national park system.

As I read that again now I realize – 3,000 years old! This tree was growing for almost 1,000 years before Christ was born and walked the earth.  I don’t know about you but getting my head around large periods of time is sometimes hard to do.  So many periods of human history and related events have occurred around the world while this tree and others in the park grew ever taller and taller.  And then I visit and stand like an ant next to them and look up at them snapping pictures with a wide angle lens doing my best to get all of tree captured in my frame.  I would like to visit again because there were some parts of the park that were closed as it was recovering from fires a bit earlier.  In 2021 there were reports that the General Grant tree and others here were in danger of being burned in one of the massive raging forest fires.  They were preparing to protect the tree from the fire but thankfully the fire never quite reached these trees.  I don’t want to imagine losing these.

Funnily, when I came home from the trip and looked at the pictures I captured here that day, I don’t feel they really do justice in portraying their overwhelming size.