Sequoia National Park is a national park of the United States in the southern Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, California. The park was established on September 25, 1890, and today protects 404,064 acres (631 sq mi; 163,519 ha; 1,635 km2) of forested mountainous terrain. Encompassing a vertical relief of nearly 13,000 feet (4,000 m), the park contains the highest point in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, at 14,505 feet (4,421 m) above sea level. The park is south of, and contiguous with, Kings Canyon National Park; both parks are administered by the National Park Service together as Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. UNESCO designated the areas as Sequoia-Kings Canyon Biosphere Reserve in 1976.
The park is notable for its giant sequoia trees, including the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on Earth by volume. The General Sherman Tree grows in the Giant Forest, which contains five of the ten largest trees in the world. The Giant Forest is connected by the Generals Highway to Kings Canyon National Park's General Grant Grove, home of the General Grant Tree among other giant sequoias. The park's giant sequoia forests are part of 202,430 acres (316 sq mi; 81,921 ha; 819 km2) of old-growth forests shared by Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The parks preserve a landscape that was the ancestral homelands of the Monache (Western Mono), the Tubatulabal, the Owens Valley Paiute, the Yokuts, and the Shoshone (Newe) tribes prior to Euro-American settlement.
Front country
Many park visitors enter Sequoia National Park through its southern entrance near the town of Three Rivers at Ash Mountain at 1,700 ft (520 m) elevation. The lower elevations around Ash Mountain contain the only National Park Service-protected California Foothills ecosystem, consisting of blue oak woodlands, foothills chaparral, grasslands, yucca plants, and steep, mild river valleys. Seasonal weather results in a changing landscape throughout the foothills with hot summer yielding an arid landscape while spring and winter rains result in blossoming wildflowers and lush greens. The region is also home to abundant wildlife: bobcats, foxes, ground squirrels, rattlesnakes, and mule deer are commonly seen in this area, and more rarely, reclusive mountain lions and the Pacific fisher are seen as well. The last California grizzly was killed in this park in 1922 (at Horse Corral Meadow). The California Black Oak is a key transition species between the chaparral and higher elevation conifer forest.
At higher elevations in the front country, between 5,500 and 9,000 feet (1,700 and 2,700 m) in elevation, the landscape becomes montane forest-dominated coniferous belt. Found here are Ponderosa, Jeffrey, sugar, and lodgepole pine trees, as well as abundant white and red fir. Found here too are the giant sequoia trees, the most massive living single-stem trees on Earth. Between the trees, spring and summer snowmelts sometimes fan out to form lush, though delicate, meadows. In this region, visitors often see mule deer, Douglas squirrels, and American black bears, which sometimes break into unattended cars to eat food left by careless visitors. There are plans to reintroduce the bighorn sheep to this park.
Back country
The vast majority of the park is road-less wilderness; no road crosses the Sierra Nevada within the park's boundaries. 84 percent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks is designated wilderness and is accessible only by foot or by horseback. The majority was designated Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness in 1984 and the southwest portion was protected as John Krebs Wilderness in 2009.
History
Native Americans
The area which now is Sequoia National Park shows evidence of Native American settlement as early as AD 1000. The area was home to "Monachee" (Western Mono) Native Americans, who resided mainly in the Kaweah River drainage in the Foothills region of what is now the western part of the park, though evidence of seasonal habitation exists as high as the Giant Forest. Members of this tribe were permanent residents of the park, with a population estimate of around 2,000. They lived in groups of one to eight families per village, with a chief who organized ceremonies and helped people in need, and a messenger who assisted the chief and settled disputes in the community. Ceremonies included an annual mourning ceremony to remember the dead, especially those who had died within the past year. During this time, the Western Mono tribe would travel over the high mountain passes to trade with the Owens Valley Paiute and the Yokuts. To this day, pictographs can be found at several sites within the park, notably at Hospital Rock and Potwisha, as well as bedrock mortars used to process acorns, a staple food for the Monachee people.
The indigenous Tübatulabal people resided in the eastern part of the area (the Kern River drainage). The Tübatulabal language is in the Uto-Aztecan language family but is distinctive from the languages of other tribes in the region. The tribe was made up of three bands, each having their own chief, which regularly met and intermarried. They were semi-nomadic, moving regularly in warmer months but building more permanent villages in the winter. These villages included dwellings for two to six families and supply storage huts built each fall. Their diet was made up mainly of acorns, pine nuts, and fish, and also included 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 up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range on the modern day park land. Their society was organized into about fifty groups, each with their own chief and territory. According to their customs, a married couple would initially spend one year living with the woman's parents, and then would move into a home near the man's parents. Swimming was a popular activity, with teenagers regularly going to swim on winter nights for "toughening". Crafted items made by the tribe were numerous and included baskets, trapping and fishing equipment, rafts, ropes, ovens, stone tools, and pottery. They traded with the Monachee people as well as with the Miwok Native Americans who lived north of them. In the modern day, many Yokuts live on the Tule River Reservation or the Santa Rosa Rancheria, with tribal council governments. A small number still live in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas near their ancestral territories, but none reside within park boundaries.
Other Native American peoples within the park included the Owens Valley Paiute, who inhabited the area east of Sequoia National Park, and the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada within the modern park boundaries. The tribe is often misassociated with other neighboring tribes because of their linguistic similarities with the Mono people and their cultural similarities to the Northern Paiutes in Nevada. The Owens Valley Paiute were a hunter-gatherer society who were also skilled in fishing and in irrigation techniques. Additionally, the Shoshone (Newe) people lived to the east of the Sierra Nevadas, as well as in the Great Basin. These people lived in extended family groups, each of which had a distinctive home area. Families chose a name for themselves based on geographical or cultural features specific to them, and the people named themselves the Newe as a whole. The name Shoshone was given to them by early white explorers in the 1820s. To this day, many of the Shoshone in the region live on Rancherias together with members of the Owens Valley Paiute, including the Bishop, Big Pine, and Lone Pine rancherias. The two tribes also live together in the Fort Independence Reservation. Together, they have joint tribal councils governing at each of these locations.
European settlement
The first European settler to homestead in the area was Hale Tharp, who built a home out of a hollowed-out fallen giant sequoia log in the Giant Forest next to Log Meadow. Tharp arrived in 1858 to the region and encountered several groups of Native Americans, the largest being around 600 with several other smaller groups found at higher elevations. After becoming friendly with the Western Mono tribe, Tharp was shown the Giant Forest Sequoia Grove. After his settlement, more settlers came around 1860.
Shortly thereafter - between 1860 and 1863, epidemics of smallpox, measles, and scarlet fever killed the majority of the Native Americans living in the area. After this, the rest of the Native Americans were forcibly removed from the largest campsite (Hospital Rock) by 1865. During their time in the area, the Monachee used periodic fire burning to aid in hunting and agriculture. This technique played an important role in the ecology of the region and allowed for a "natural" vegetation cover development. After they left, Tharp and other settlers allowed sheep and cattle to graze the meadow, while at the same time maintaining a respect for the grandeur of the forest and led early battles against logging in the area. From time to time, Tharp received visits from John Muir, who would stay at Tharp's log cabin. Tharp's Log can still be visited today in its original location in the Giant Forest.
Tharp's attempts to conserve the giant sequoias were at first met with only limited success. In the 1880s, white settlers seeking to create a utopian society founded the Kaweah Colony, which sought economic success in trading Sequoia timber. Giant Sequoia trees, unlike their coast redwood relatives, were later discovered to splinter easily and therefore were ill-suited to timber harvesting, though thousands of trees were felled before logging operations finally ceased.
Park status
President Benjamin Harrison ultimately signed legislation that established the Sequoia National Park on September 25, 1890, becoming the second national park established in the United States, and ending logging in the area.
Buffalo Soldiers
Another consequence of the Giant Forest becoming Sequoia National Park was the shift in park employment. Prior to the incorporation by the National Park Service, the park was managed by US army troops of the 24th Regiment of Infantry and the 9th Regiment of Cavalry, better known as the Buffalo Soldiers. These segregated troops, founded in 1866, were African-American men from the South, an invaluable demographic to the military with the lowest rates of desertion. The Buffalo Soldiers completed park infrastructure projects as well as park management duties, helping to shape the role of the modern-day park ranger. The Buffalo Soldiers rose to this position due to a lack of funding for the park which led to an inability to hire civilians.
The third African-American West Point graduate, Captain Charles Young led the cavalries of Buffalo Soldiers in the Sequoia and General Grant Parks. Young landed this post as a result of the segregation rampant throughout the Army: as a black man, he was not permitted to head any combat units. He led by delegating park infrastructure projects, hosting tourists and politicians, and setting a standard of a strong work ethic into his men. Young was also a prominent figure regarding the early conservation of Sequoia National Park. He greenlighted the dedication of trees in honor of prominent figures as a means of promoting their preservation. One such example is the Redwood dedicated to the escaped slave and activist, Booker T Washington. Young also argued to the Secretary of the Interior that the lack of enforcement of forest protection laws allowed the detrimental practices of logging and the popular tourist hobby of carving names into the redwoods to continue.
Sierra Club
An expansions occurred in 1978, when grassroots efforts, spearheaded by the Sierra Club, fought off attempts by the Walt Disney Company to purchase a high-alpine former mining site south of the park for use as a ski resort. This site known as Mineral King was annexed to the park. Its name dates back to early 1873 when the miners in the area formed the Mineral King Mining District. Mineral King is the highest-elevation developed site within the park and a popular destination for backpackers.
The national park was partially closed in September 2020 due to the SQF Complex Fire, and fully closed in mid-September through mid-December 2021 due to the KNP Complex Fire.
Climate
According to the Köppen climate classification system, Sequoia National Park encompasses five climate types listed here from highest to lowest elevation; Tundra (ET), Mediterranean-influenced Subarctic climate (Dsc), Mediterranean-influenced warm-summer Humid continental climate (Dsb), Warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb), and Hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Csa). Precipitation also decreases with elevation. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the Plant Hardiness zone at Giant Forest Visitor Center (6,444 ft (1,964 m)) is 8a with an average annual extreme minimum temperature of 12.0 °F (−11.1 °C).