General Grant Tree

The General Grant Tree is a giant sequoia in Kings Canyon National Park, high on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in California, and it is one of the largest living things on Earth. It is about 81.5 metres (267 feet) tall and nearly 33 metres around at the base, and by volume of trunk it ranks as the second-largest tree in the world. Its age is estimated at around 1,650 years, younger than older estimates of over two thousand, but still reaching back to the late Roman world.

What strikes a visitor is less its height than its mass. The trunk rises like a cinnamon-coloured column of fibrous, fire-scarred bark, barely tapering for dozens of metres, with a broad, rounded crown of heavy limbs far above. Giant sequoias depend on fire to open their cones and clear the ground for seedlings, and the thick spongy bark lets them survive burns that kill other trees; the scars on the Grant show fires it has lived through. In 2003 it climbed one place in the size rankings when fire caused by lightning destroyed the crown of the Washington Tree, which had been larger.

The tree was named in 1867 in honour of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general who became president. On 28 April 1926 President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed it the Nation's Christmas Tree. On 29 March 1956 President Eisenhower declared it a National Shrine, a memorial to Americans who died in war, and it remains the only living object in the country with that status.

The tree stands in the General Grant Grove, reached by a paved loop trail about a third of a mile long. Along the way you pass the Fallen Monarch, a sequoia hollowed by fire whose fallen trunk you can walk through, and the Gamlin Cabin, built in 1872 by the brothers Israel and Thomas Gamlin, who had filed a timber claim in the grove.

Getting there

The grove is in the Grant Grove area of Kings Canyon National Park, about 44 km in a straight line from the town of Dinuba. The nearest airport is Fresno Yosemite International (FAT), about 67 km away. From Fresno, take Highway 180 east into the park towards Grant Grove Village; the trailhead is at the General Grant Tree car park, about 1.6 km north-west of the Kings Canyon Visitor Center.