Sequoia

Sequoia National Park, located in the southern Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, California, became a U.S. national park on September 25, 1890. It now covers 404,064 acres (631 square miles) of mountainous, forested terrain. With a vertical elevation change of nearly 13,000 feet (4,000 meters), the park includes Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, which rises 14,505 feet (4,421 meters) above sea level. The park sits just south of and connects with Kings Canyon National Park; the two are managed together by the National Park Service as Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. In 1976, UNESCO designated the area the Sequoia-Kings Canyon Biosphere Reserve.

The park is famous for its giant sequoia trees, especially the General Sherman Tree, which holds the title of the largest tree on Earth by volume. This tree is located in the Giant Forest, an area that contains five of the ten largest trees in the world. The Generals Highway links the Giant Forest to Kings Canyon National Park’s General Grant Grove, where the General Grant Tree and other giant sequoias stand. The giant sequoia forests in both parks are part of 202,430 acres (316 square miles) of old-growth forest. Before Euro-American settlement, this landscape was the ancestral home of the Monache (Western Mono), Tubatulabal, Owens Valley Paiute, Yokuts, and Shoshone (Newe) tribes.

**Front country**

Most visitors enter Sequoia National Park through its southern entrance near the town of Three Rivers at Ash Mountain, which sits at 1,700 feet (520 meters) in elevation. The lower elevations around Ash Mountain protect the only California Foothills ecosystem within the National Park Service system, featuring blue oak woodlands, foothills chaparral, grasslands, yucca plants, and steep, mild river valleys. Seasonal weather changes the foothills dramatically: hot summers create an arid landscape, while spring and winter rains bring blossoming wildflowers and lush greenery. Wildlife here is abundant, including bobcats, foxes, ground squirrels, rattlesnakes, and mule deer; more rarely, reclusive mountain lions and the Pacific fisher appear. The last California grizzly in the park was killed in 1922 at Horse Corral Meadow. The California Black Oak serves as a key transition species between the chaparral and higher-elevation conifer forests.

At higher front-country elevations, between 5,500 and 9,000 feet (1,700 to 2,700 meters), the landscape shifts to a montane forest dominated by conifers. Here grow Ponderosa, Jeffrey, sugar, and lodgepole pine trees, along with abundant white and red fir. This is also where the giant sequoias—the most massive living single-stem trees on Earth—are found. Between the trees, spring and summer snowmelts sometimes create lush but delicate meadows. Visitors commonly see mule deer, Douglas squirrels, and American black bears, which occasionally break into unattended cars to eat food left by careless people. Plans exist to reintroduce bighorn sheep to the park.

**Back country**

Most of the park is road-less wilderness; no road crosses the Sierra Nevada within its boundaries. Eighty-four percent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks is designated wilderness, accessible only on foot or horseback. The majority was designated Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness in 1984, while the southwest portion became John Krebs Wilderness in 2009.

**History**

**Native Americans**

Evidence shows Native American settlement in what is now Sequoia National Park as early as AD 1000. The area was home to the Monache (Western Mono) people, who lived mainly in the Kaweah River drainage in the foothills of the park’s western region, though seasonal habitation existed as high as the Giant Forest. Around 2,000 members of this tribe were permanent residents, living in groups of one to eight families per village. Each village had a chief who organized ceremonies and helped people in need, and a messenger who assisted the chief and settled disputes. Ceremonies included an annual mourning ceremony to remember those who had died in the past year. The Western Mono would travel over high mountain passes to trade with the Owens Valley Paiute and the Yokuts. Pictographs remain at several sites in the park, including Hospital Rock and Potwisha, along with bedrock mortars used to process acorns, a staple food for the Monache.

The Tübatulabal people lived in the eastern part of the area, in the Kern River drainage. Their language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family but is distinct from other regional tribal languages. The tribe consisted of three bands, each with its own chief, who regularly met and intermarried. They were semi-nomadic, moving frequently in warmer months but building more permanent villages in winter. These villages had dwellings for two to six families and supply storage huts built each fall. Their diet relied heavily on acorns, pine nuts, and fish, along with berries, seeds, plants, and local game. They made a wide variety of tools, including baskets, pottery, hunting, trapping, and fishing materials, sewing supplies, and musical instruments.

The Yokuts inhabited the San Joaquin Valley west of the park and extended into the Sierra Nevada foothills on modern park land. Their society was organized into about fifty groups, each with its own chief and territory. According to their customs, a married couple would initially spend one year living with the woman’s parents, then move into a home near the husband’s family.