Your National Parks, with Detailed Information for Tourists

by Enos A. Mills; Laurence Frederick Schmeckebier

These trees bear seeds each year. In a fruitful year a Big Tree may produce one million seeds. These are exceedingly small and light. The tree blooms in late winter, while the earth is still covered with snow. The flowers are pale green and pale yellow. The cones are bright green and are about two and one-half inches in length. They shed their seeds as soon as they are ripened, but the cones sometimes cling to the trees for months. If the seeds alight on freshly upturned soil or soil recently burned over, they usually sprout and grow vigorously. They do best in the sunlight. But if the seeds fall upon a grass- or trash-covered forest floor, they fail to sprout.

With branches nearly to the earth, the outline of a young tree is that of a slender pyramid. As the tree ages, the lower branches fall off. In middle-aged trees, the trunk commonly is free of branches from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet above the ground. The tiptop of aged trees usually is a dead snag, surrounded by living, up-curved side branches from the trunk. The original tops of nearly all old trees have been smashed by lightning.

Usually in young trees the bark is almost purplish; in old ones it is cinnamon-color. This bark is fire-resisting, is from one to two feet thick, and is good protection to the vitals of the tree. The roots are short, but the base of the trunk is heavily, artistically buttressed.

Living or dead, the Big Tree has extraordinary durability. It has exceptional vitality and recuperative power. Its long life probably is due to the fact that it is almost immune from insect pests, the most deadly enemies of all other kinds of trees. Men, fire, and lightning are the worst enemies of the Big Tree. Most of the old ones have had their heads shattered by lightning again and again, but they still insist on living and will produce a new top even though the old one is entirely smashed off. These trees appear to be almost immortal. Unless they starve or meet a violent death, they live on and on.

John Muir says that the wood in the Big Trees has an endurance almost equal to that of granite, and gives the following illustration. He cut a piece of sound wood from the trunk of a fallen monarch that had been lying upon the earth several hundred years. In falling, the trunk of this Big Tree was cracked across in a number of places. Into these cracks fire ate its way each time a forest fire swept the locality. Each of these fires probably was separated from the following one by a number of years, and it probably took a great many burns to cut this slow-burning wood into sections. But at last this was done. Between the ends of two of these sections a fir tree took root and grew. After all these years, and after the fir tree had lived three hundred and eighty years, the sections of the Big Tree still lay upon the ground, apparently as sound as the day the tree fell.

All Big-Tree groves appear to have gone through forest fires. It is probable that most of these groves have been repeatedly fire-swept. Many of the trees show fire-scars that cannot be entirely healed for centuries.

The Big Tree has been called the noblest of a noble race. Its enormous size, its excellent proportions, its serenity, its steadfastness, its age, make it the most impressive living object. John Muir, in commenting on the imperishable nature of the sequoia, says he feels confident that if every one of these trees were to die to-day, numerous monuments of their existence would remain available for the student for more than ten thousand years.

But the Big Tree is not verging toward extinction. Its greatest danger is from general destruction by man. The Big-Tree area has not diminished, but probably has slightly increased in the last few thousand years. Seeds sprout readily and young trees grow vigorously. John Muir thus comments concerning the tree and its distribution:—

The Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea) is Nature's forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things. It belongs to an ancient stock, as its remains in old rocks show, and has a strange air of other days about it, a thoroughbred look inherited from the long ago—the auld lang syne of trees. Once the genus was common, and with many species flourished in the now desolate arctic regions, in the interior of North America, and in Europe, but in long eventful wanderings from climate to climate only two species have survived the hardships they had to encounter.

The Big Trees probably were discovered by General John Bidwell in 1841. John Muir studied them for years, and then gave to the world an accurate account of them.