Hi. I’m Cathy Purchis, a ranger naturalist here at Kings Canyon National Park.

The General Grant Tree Trail is a paved, half-mile trail through the heart of the General Grant Grove.

On our hike today you are going to see some of the major highlights on this  trail, and learn how people have interacted with the big trees over time.

Large numbers of Euro-Americans first started coming to the sequoia groves soon after the end of the American Civil War.

The General Grant Tree was discovered in 1862 by Joseph Hardin Thomas. He ran a lumber mill in the area.

The tree was named in 1867 by Lucretia Baker, the wife of a local merchant and an admirer of General Grant’s.

Five years later, when Ulysses Grant had become president of the United States, he signed the bill creating Yellowstone, the world's first national park.

The area around the Grant Grove was set aside in 1890 as General Grant National Park. Yosemite National Park was created in the same bill. That makes these two areas the country’s third oldest national parks.

In the early days, protecting the park seemed like a simple thing. Keep people from cutting down the trees. Keep the sheep and cattle herders out. And put out all the forest fires. It turns out things are not that simple.

Park managers planted these young sequoias in 1949. The Park Service had become concerned because no sequoias had sprouted naturally in this grove in over 50 years.

We now know that this was because the park's caretakers had been putting out all the forest fires. Fire is an important ingredient in the creation and survival of sequoia groves.

The hot air from the fires rises up to heat the cones of the sequoia and release their tiny, oatmeal-sized seeds.
These seeds haven’t got a lot of room to store the energy they need to sprout. Fire clears the ground of needles and other debris that would keep the seeds from getting their roots into the soil before they run out of energy. It also gets rid of bushes and trees and other things that would block the sunlight that the young sequoias need to grow.

Today, the Park Service intentionally sets fires in sequoia groves to restore this natural process.

Up ahead, the Tennessee Tree dramatically shows that fire was a part of life in Grant Grove long before this was a national park. Repeated fires eventually burned through the tree’s thick bark and hollowed out the inside. Yet this tree continues to grow!

The name Tennessee Tree comes from the days when Lewis L. Davis was the park's first civilian ranger. Ranger Davis invited people to name a tree after their home state. We know of 38 states that have trees named after them. There was no systematic way to keep track of the names of trees back in those days. So we don’t know if the other states never had trees named after them—or if they did, but the names have been lost. Naming a tree after a favorite person or place was one of the ways the first visitors to these parks made connections to the giant sequoias.

Even though all sequoias are special trees, some sequoias, like the one just ahead, do attract more attention than others.

The General Grant is the world's second-largest sequoia. Sequoias are ranked by volume, not by height or girth. Only the General Sherman Tree in Giant Forest contains more wood than the General Grant.

President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed this "The Nation's Christmas Tree." Ceremonies are still held at the base of the tree on the second Sunday in December. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower designated the Grant Tree as a living National Shrine in memory of all Americans who have died in war.

These days, national parks—and the features they protect—are considered special places that give us a window into what this country was like in the past. But in the past, they were just another place to make a living.

In 1869, Israel Gamlin file a claim on 160 acres of timberland surrounding the General Grant Grove. Gamlin was a French-Canadian immigrant who was working at one of the local lumber mills.

Israel and his brother Thomas built this cabin from sugar pine logs in 1872. Sugar pine was the most valuable timber tree when logging was going on in the Grant Grove area in the late 1800s.

Much of the sequoia that was logged was used for fence posts, or roof shakes like the ones on this cabin.

The Gamlins were the first white residents of Grant Grove. They grazed cattle here in the summer before the sequoia grove was designated as a national park.

General Grant National Park was created in 1890, but the  Park Service did not exist until 1916. The first rangers in this park were members of the U.S. Cavalry.

They used this building to store hay and grain for their horses. It was also the home of Ranger Davis, who lived here from 1902 to 1909.

John Muir visited the Gamlin brothers in 1873, and they told him that there had been 50 visitors to the grove in the past six weeks.

Since getting people to the trees back then was a challenge, promoters came up with the idea of taking the trees to the people.

In 1875, loggers cut down this sequoia tree to take to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. They took a 16-foot section of the tree and hauled it out of the forest by bull team. Unfortunately, they had to cut it into pieces to get it out of here. And when they got it to Philadelphia, the obvious lines where they  put it back together made people think this was a hoax.

Several other sequoias were cut down later to send back east. Portions of the Mark Twain Tree, which came from nearby Big Stump Basin, are still on display in the New York and British Museums of Natural History.

Today the idea of cutting down a tree that has lived for over a thousand years just to show it to people seems ridiculous. But now that we have airplanes and a modern highway, visitors from around the world can come and see the trees in the forest.

All these visitors created a dilemma in August 1967, when this giant sequoia was struck by lightning.

The top 25 feet of the tree shattered and caught on fire. Lightning-caused fires are a natural part of the sequoia forest, but the California Tree is right next to the trail. The smoke, burning embers and pieces of wood falling out of the tree posed a safety hazard to the people below. The National Park Service decided that this fire needed to be put out.

Park forester Charlie Castro climbed up a fir tree next to the giant sequoia. Then he pulled himself hand over hand across a rope stretched between the two trees. He climbed up the California Tree until he was about 15 feet below the fire. From there, he could use a hose to spray up into the burning treetop and put it out!

Although lightning can set a sequoia tree on fire, most fires in sequoia groves burn along the ground, not in the tops of the trees.

The bark at the bottom of the giant sequoia is up to three feet thick, and doesn’t burn easily.

This is important because tree ring studies show that fires used to happen in sequoia groves about once every seven to 25 years.

Sometimes fires do burn through the bark and into the wood, as we saw at the Tennessee Tree. The same thing happened to this tree when it was alive and standing. Once a “normal” tree got a hole in it like this, insects and disease would come in and cause the tree to die. But the giant sequoia has a chemical called tannin that keeps out the insects and disease and allows the tree to continue growing.

As the Fallen Monarch shows, sequoias usually die, not from disease, but by falling over.Even after they die, the tannin in the trunks keeps sequoias from decomposing quickly.

The Gamlin brothers lived in it while they were building their cabin, over 125 years ago. After that, they turned it into a hotel and saloon. The loggers who cut down the Centennial Tree lived here, and the Cavalry used it as a temporary stable for their 32 horses.

In the early days, the challenges rangers faced in the past were things like preventing logging, and learning how to manage fire. Today, these have given way to new challenges, as we try to figure out the effects that things like air pollution and climate change will have on these special places.

What will a walk along the Grant Tree Trail be like 100 years from now? We hope that this hike has inspired you to learn more about the giant sequoias and to discover ways you can help preserve and protect Kings Canyon National Park for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations.