Big Trees on Crescent Meadow Road

And they said, go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven . . . Thus in the Eleventh Chapter of Genesis is recorded for the building of the Tower of Babel. A hundred years or two before the birth of Abraham, and doubtless while the Tower of Babel was still standing, a tiny seed in the warm soil of a mountain slope on quite the opposite side of the world thrust into the light of day a slender green spike. Today we can go to the Sequoia National Park and if we have the patience of John Muir, the naturalist, we can count on the stump of a prostrate Sequoia the more than 4,000 rings that measure its span of life. The trunk, exclusive of bark, was thirty-five feet, eight inches in diameter. As the bark of a Sequoia is two feet or more in thickness, this giant must have measured forty feet in diameter when it was still growing.

While we shall see Big Trees in other parts of California, by far the greatest aggregation and individual trees of the greatest size are to be found in the Sequoia National Park. These are the special characteristics of Sequoia--the oldest and largest trees in the world. Crescent Meadow Road is in the western part of the Park and not far from where we are walking is the General Sherman Tree in the Giant Forest Group, the oldest living thing in the world. Because it is standing, it is impossible to determine the age of this tree, but it is probably about 3,500 years old.