The Giant Sequoia tree is the most massive thing that ever lived on Earth. Heavier than the California Redwood, the blue whale, any dinosaur. Here at the Tuolemne Grove words like “titanic” are appropriate, and perhaps shouldn’t be used so casually elsewhere. Pictures don’t convey it — this one is 40 or so feet behind me so the perspective is wrong.
But we’ve all seen pictures of these before, though it’s nice to have one of my own showing daughter C. and I inside one of the famous tunnel trees.
This one was already a dead stump when they cut through it in the 1870s. We could see 130 years’ graffiti inside.
This one fell ten years ago. Walking up to it it reminded me — this is a geeky reference and I apologize — of that gigantic skeleton in the desert in the first Star Wars movie. The inside was hollow and you could walk into it and stand upright.
When we first arrived there were about ten people sitting up on the roots.
The biggest of these trees are 3000 years old, saplings when David took down Goliath. How big are they? A better question might be, “how small are you?”
Imagine the biggest tree near you. A really big one, like a 200-year-old oak or an especially wide sycamore. Then take a Ken doll or a Barbie doll and put it down next to it. That’s you next to a giant sequoia.