THE YOSEMITE VALLEY
The Big Trees
SIX
A most interesting feature of the Yosemite region is the Big Trees. There are three groves of giant trees near the valley—the Tuolumne, Merced, and Mariposa. The first two named are small groves. The important grove is the Mariposa. This grove is so called from its situation in Mariposa (Butterfly) County. It occupies a tract of land about four square miles in area, and consists of two definite groups of trees. Its elevation above the sea level varies from 5,000 to 8,000 feet.
The Big Tree, or Sequoia gigantea, is found only on the west slope of the Sierra Range. The Redwood, or Sequoia sempervirens, its twin brother, is strictly a seaboard tree, being confined to the coast ranges. The Big Tree, however, is the giant of all, and it is of this species that the Mariposa Grove is made up.
The first grove of Big Trees discovered by white men was the Calaveras Grove of Big Trees in California. This was in the spring of 1852, and the discoverer was A. T. Dowd. Soon the story of the Big Trees found its way into the newspapers, and no other plant ever attracted so much attention or gained such celebrity within so short a period. The species was named in honor of Sequoyah, or Sequoia, to give it the Latin spelling, a Cherokee Indian of mixed blood, who was also known as George Guess. He invented an alphabet and written language for his tribe.
The Big Trees are the oldest living things in the world. It is impossible to appreciate their huge size from a mere description. They must be seen; and even then a sense of futility strikes the beholder. The Big Trees grow in groves, never forming groups by themselves, but always scattered among a much larger number of trees of other kinds.
Says John Muir, the famous naturalist: “The whole tree for the first century or two, or until it is a hundred or one hundred and fifty feet high, is arrowhead in form, and, compared with the solemn rigidity of age, seems as sensitive to the wind as a squirrel’s tail. As it grows older, the lower branches are gradually dropped and the upper ones thinned out, until comparatively few are left. The immensely strong, stately shafts are free of limbs for one hundred and fifty feet or so. The large limbs reach out with equal boldness in every direction, showing no weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed, so finely molded in outline, and so perfectly subordinate to an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five to seven or eight feet in diameter, and perhaps a thousand years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others it dissolves in bosses of branchlets and sprays as soon as the general outline is approached. Except in picturesque old age, after being struck by lightning or broken by thousands of snow-storms, the regularity of forms is one of their most distinguishing characteristics. Another is the simple beauty of the trunk, and its great thickness as compared with its height and the width of the branches, which makes them look more like finely modeled and sculptured architectural columns than the stems of trees, while the great limbs look like rafters, supporting the magnificent dome-head. But though so consummately beautiful, the Big Tree always seems unfamiliar, with peculiar physiognomy, awfully solemn and earnest; yet with all its strangeness it impresses us as being more at home than any of its neighbors, holding the best right to the ground as the oldest, strongest inhabitant.”
The Mariposa Grove—which was discovered in 1857 by Galen Clark—lies in a little valley occupying a depression on the back of a ridge. The Lower Grove contains 240 fine Big Trees. The Grizzly Giant is the largest of all. It has a circumference of ninety-three feet and a diameter of thirty and six-tenths feet. Its main limb is six and one-half feet in diameter. This tree is very much injured, and its size has been decreased by burning. It has long since passed its prime, and has a battered and worn appearance.
In ascending to the Upper Grove the road goes through a tunnel cut through the heart of the “Wawona,” a living Sequoia. This tunnel is ten feet high and nine and one-half feet wide at the bottom.