General Sherman

General Sherman is a giant sequoia in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, and by volume it is the largest known living single-stem tree on Earth. The trunk holds an estimated 1,487 cubic metres of wood; the tree stands 83.8 m tall, measures about 31 m around at the ground, and its first large branch springs out roughly 40 m above the base. It is not the tallest tree (a coast redwood holds that record), nor the widest, nor the oldest, but no other living tree combines height and girth on this scale. Its age is estimated at 2,300 to 2,700 years.

Standing at its foot is less about reading numbers than about losing a sense of scale. The trunk rises almost without taper, a column of reddish bark, and the crown is so high above that it is hard to take in. In January 2006 the tree dropped its biggest branch, a limb more than 2 m thick and over 30 m long, which smashed part of the fence and cratered the paved path around the base; nobody saw it fall. In September 2021, when the KNP Complex Fire threatened the grove, crews wrapped the base of the trunk in foil fire shelter material, and the tree came through unharmed.

The name has a story of its own. The accepted version, which may be apocryphal, is that the naturalist James Wolverton, who had served under General William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War, named the tree in 1879. A few years later the land passed to the Kaweah Colony, a utopian socialist logging community, whose members renamed it the Karl Marx Tree; when the colony broke up after the national park was established in 1890, the old name returned. Comparisons with the General Grant Tree in 1931 established Sherman as the largest tree in the world and helped make wood volume the standard measure for ranking big trees.

Giant Forest, at around 2,100 m, holds five of the ten largest trees in the world, and General Sherman is only the start. The Congress group of sequoias stands between the tree and the Giant Forest Museum, and nearby are Moro Rock, a granite dome climbed by a 351-step stairway built in the 1930s, and Crescent Meadow, the western trailhead of the High Sierra Trail to Mount Whitney.

Getting there

The nearest sizeable town by straight line is Porterville, about 62 km away, and the nearest airport on the map is Eastern Sierra Regional Airport (BIH) at Bishop, about 94 km away, but it lies on the far side of the Sierra Nevada and no road crosses the range inside the park. In practice visitors come from the west: from Visalia on State Route 198 through the southern entrance near Three Rivers, or from Fresno on State Route 180, with the Generals Highway linking Giant Forest to Kings Canyon National Park. Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT) is the usual gateway by air.