The Big Trees
Between the heavy pine and silver fir zones towers
the Big Tree (Sequoia gigantea), the king of all the
conifers in the world, “the noblest of the noble
race.” The groves nearest Yosemite Valley
are about twenty miles to the westward and southward
and are called the Tuolumne, Merced and Mariposa groves.
It extends, a widely interrupted belt, from a very
small grove on the middle fork of the American River
to the head of Deer Creek, a distance of about 260
miles, its northern limit being near the thirty-ninth
parallel, the southern a little below the thirty-sixth.
The elevation of the belt above the sea varies from
about 5000 to 8000 feet. From the American River
to Kings River the species occurs only in small isolated
groups so sparsely distributed along the belt that
three of the gaps in it are from forty to sixty miles
wide. But from Kings River south-ward the sequoia
is not restricted to mere groves but extends across
the wide rugged basins of the Kaweah and Tule Rivers
in noble forests, a distance of nearly seventy miles,
the continuity of this part of the belt being broken
only by the main canyons. The Fresno, the largest
of the northern groves, has an area of three or four
square miles, a short distance to the southward of
the famous Mariposa grove. Along the south rim
of the canyon of the south fork of Kings River there
is a majestic sequoia forest about six miles long by
two wide. This is the northernmost group that
may fairly be called a forest. Descending the
divide between the Kings and Kaweah Rivers you come
to the grand forests that form the main continuous
portion of the belt. Southward the giants become
more and more irrepressibly exuberant, heaving their
massive crowns into the sky from every ridge and slope,
waving onward in graceful compliance with the complicated
topography of the region. The finest of the Kaweah
section of the belt is on the broad ridge between
Marble Creek and the middle fork, and is called the
Giant Forest. It extends from the granite headlands,
overlooking the hot San Joaquin plains, to within
a few miles of the cool glacial fountains of the summit
peaks. The extreme upper limit of the belt is
reached between the middle and south forks of the
Kaweah at a height of 8400 feet, but the finest block
of big tree forests in the entire belt is on the north
fork of Tule River, and is included in the Sequoia
National Park.
In the northern groves there are comparatively few
young trees or saplings. But here for every old
storm-beaten giant there are many in their prime and
for each of these a crowd of hopeful young trees and
saplings, growing vigorously on moraines, rocky edges,
along water courses and meadows. But though the
area occupied by the big tree increases so greatly
from north to south, here is no marked increase in
the size of the trees. The height of 275 feet
or thereabouts and a diameter of about twenty feet,
