In 1892, boosters in Tulare County decided to chop down the General Noble Tree, a 3,200-year-old giant sequoia. Loggers cut the 300-foot-tall old-growth behemoth into segments, then reassembled a 40-foot section of it at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, better known as the Chicago world’s fair.
Fairgoers climbed inside via a spiral staircase, but like the sequoia displayed at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition that was dubbed the “California Hoax,” the General Noble generated skepticism. None other than President Grover Cleveland doubted the towerlike trunk was real.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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The General Noble’s 20-foot-tall stump still presides over the killing fields of Converse Basin, considered the greatest of all sequoia groves before its trees were felled by the thousands for little more than picket fences and toothpicks.
We’ve progressed since then. The world’s largest trees by volume, giant sequoias are objects of reverence. Each year, tourists make the pilgrimage to the biggest survivors—the General Sherman and the General Grant—in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Short paved trails from the parking lot provide a drive-up devotion for all, whether an avid hiker or people with a physical disability.
The easy access to see these giants has necessitated rustic fencing that separates the trees from their selfie-seeking admirers. These measures, however, have turned the Sherman and Grant trees into museum pieces. The experience is not unlike seeing the Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass: There they are, but something’s missing. In this case, wildness.
Once North America’s dominant tree, sequoias are at the end of their 200-million-year history. They have retreated to 73 groves in the Sierra Nevada. These survivors face new threats: The 2020 Castle Fire alone killed nearly 11,000 large sequoias, or about 14 percent of the population.
So if you’re able, make your own pilgrimage to a remote grove, hiking through stands of sugar and Jeffrey pines. The sequoias will suddenly appear, their trunks a striking cinnamon against the forest green. The trees seem to have been conjured from an earlier time in creation, and finding them is as stunning as it would be to come upon a herd of woolly mammoths. So you walk to the biggest tree you can find and look up, searching for a treetop too high to see. Then, invariably, you reach out and touch the bark to somehow make this apparition real.
Fires from centuries ago have burned deep cavities into a few of the trees, which allows you to step inside the primordial.•
