Grizzly Giant

The Grizzly Giant is the tree people picture when they think of Yosemite's sequoias. It stands in the Mariposa Grove, the park's largest grove of giant sequoias, and it is not the tallest or the most voluminous of its kind — it ranked 26th among living giant sequoias by volume in 1990 — but its presence is unforgettable: a massive, fire-scarred trunk about 64 metres tall, nearly 30 metres around at the ground and almost 8 metres across a little above its base, holding some 960 cubic metres of wood.

Current estimates put its age at about 3,000 years, give or take two and a half centuries; nineteenth-century enthusiasts guessed at many times that. The tree's scars tell the story of those millennia. Fire has consumed most of its bark and sapwood on one side, and in a single storm in 1942 it was struck by lightning six times. It has been protected by a fence since 1912 to stop visitors trampling its shallow roots and stripping its bark, and during the Washburn Fire of 2022 park crews ran sprinklers around it.

Its name was given in 1859 by the publisher James Mason Hutchings, guided by Galen Clark, the settler who became the grove's first guardian. In the 1860s Carleton Watkins photographed it, and his mammoth-plate prints did much to convince doubting audiences in the East and in Europe that trees of this size really existed. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft both came to stand beneath it. Walk the full circle around the fence: the burned side and the living side look like two different trees, and the contrast is the clearest record of how a sequoia survives fire for three thousand years.

Getting there

The Mariposa Grove lies near the South Entrance of Yosemite National Park. Clovis, on the edge of Fresno, is about 76 km away, and Fresno Yosemite International Airport (FAT) about 81 km. Cars are left at the Mariposa Grove Welcome Plaza by the South Entrance; from there a free shuttle runs to the grove's arrival area in season, and the Grizzly Giant Loop, about 2 miles (3.2 km) of easy trail, leads to the tree.