🇺🇸 United States · West Coast and California
Sequoia National Park protects, on the western slope of California's Sierra Nevada, the most extraordinary giant sequoia forests (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in the world, among them the largest tree on the planet by volume: the General Sherman. Walking among these giants —some over 80 meters tall, with trunks several meters across and thousands of years of life— is a humbling and overwhelming experience. In 1890 it became the second national park created in the United States, right after Yellowstone.
Sequoia is administered jointly with the adjoining Kings Canyon National Park, and the two are usually visited together. Besides the giant sequoias of the Giant Forest, the park covers spectacular mountain country that includes Mount Whitney, the highest summit in the contiguous United States (outside Alaska), although the usual approach to it is from the eastern side of the Sierra. The landscape combines ancient forests, caves, deep canyons and wild high mountains.
This guide covers the essentials of Sequoia with a practical eye: how to see the General Sherman and the Giant Forest, which viewpoints and walks are worth it, the curious crystal cave and Moro Rock, how access works (the mountain road is steep and winding, with limits for long vehicles), when the high roads close for snow, and where to sleep and eat inside and outside the park. It is an ideal destination to combine with Kings Canyon and, for anyone coming from the east, with Yosemite or Death Valley.
The area was the territory of the Monache (Western Mono) and Yokuts peoples, who made use of the Sierra forests. In the 19th century, after the gold rush, settlers and loggers arrived and began felling the giant sequoias, although their brittle timber turned out to be of little value. Outrage at that logging and a campaign by conservationists and the press led to the creation of Sequoia National Park in 1890, the country's second. Kings Canyon was added soon after, and the two are administered together. The park thus preserves some of the oldest and largest living things on the planet. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The golden state of the Pacific: land of dozens of Native peoples and of the Franciscan missions, forged by the gold rush of 1849, today the largest economy in the United States and the cradle of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and legendary parks such as Yosemite and Sequoia.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it was protected as a park, the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada that Sequoia now covers were the territory of Indigenous peoples who lived and traveled through them for thousands of years. Among them were the Monache or Western Mono, in the middle and upper reaches of the mountains, and the Yokuts, in the foothills and the nearby Great Central Valley. These peoples moved seasonally, making use of the different ecological zones: in the lowlands they gathered acorns and hunted, and in summer they climbed to the high country in search of resources and to trade between groups from the western and eastern sides of the Sierra.
The sequoia groves and the mountain meadows were part of their world, and they left traces such as mortars carved into the rock for processing acorns, found at several points in the park. A deep knowledge of the terrain, the plants and the animals was the basis of their life in a setting of harsh winters and short summers at altitude.
The massive arrival of settlers in California from the 1849 gold rush onward radically altered the life of these peoples, through disease, pressure on their lands and conflict. Their population dropped drastically, although their descendants keep their identity and their memory alive. The National Park Service acknowledges the long Indigenous presence in the region and includes it in the park's historical interpretation.
In the second half of the 19th century, after the gold rush, settlers, ranchers and loggers pushed into the forests of the Sierra Nevada. The giant sequoias, the largest trees in the world, immediately drew attention for their outsized scale, and before long they began to be cut down. A cruel irony soon emerged, however: giant sequoia wood is brittle and of poor quality, so many of those thousand-year-old trees splintered as they fell and turned out to have little commercial value, ending up as posts, fencing or, at worst, matchsticks and shingles.
The image of trees that had taken thousands of years to grow being felled for so little gain, together with the logging advancing through the forests, outraged much of the public and the press. Some episodes, such as the cutting of colossal specimens so that sections could be exhibited at fairs, provoked revulsion rather than admiration. A growing movement thus arose demanding that those forests be protected before they disappeared.
The area also saw singular social experiments, such as the Kaweah Colony, a utopian community of socialist inspiration that settled in the region in the late 19th century with plans to exploit the timber, and which is credited with giving the General Sherman its name (or at least with having given it another name first). Conservationist pressure eventually prevailed over the timber interests.
The campaign to save the sequoias bore fruit in 1890, when the United States Congress established Sequoia National Park, making it the country's second national park, behind only Yellowstone (1872). A few days later General Grant National Park was also created, around another famous sequoia grove, which would later be folded into Kings Canyon National Park. The aim was to put those unique trees and the forests around them beyond the reach of the axe.
In the early years, the park's administration and protection were in the hands of the United States Army, as happened at Yellowstone and Yosemite too before a civilian agency existed. The troops, including the famous African American regiments known as the buffalo soldiers, patrolled the park, built roads and trails and fought illegal logging and grazing. In 1916 the National Park Service was created and took over the management of the parks from then on.
Over time the park expanded its boundaries and improved its access, with works such as the building of the Generals Highway that links the sequoia areas. Sequoia and neighboring Kings Canyon came to be administered jointly, forming a vast protected area that runs from the sequoia forests up to the high Sierra, including Mount Whitney.
For much of the 20th century, the National Park Service applied a policy of total fire suppression, putting out any fire that broke out in the forest. In time, ecologists came to understand that this strategy was counterproductive: giant sequoias actually need fire to reproduce, since the heat opens their cones and releases the seeds, as well as clearing the understory and the build-up of fuel. From the 1960s and 1970s onward, the park began carrying out prescribed burns and letting certain natural fires burn under control, one of the first protected areas in the United States to adopt that approach.
That management was nevertheless overwhelmed in the 21st century by climate change and by more than a century of fuel accumulation in areas where controlled fire could not be applied. In September 2021, the KNP Complex fire, started by lightning, advanced to within less than two kilometers of the Giant Forest. Firefighting crews, in a scene that went around the world, wrapped the base of the General Sherman and other historic sequoias in fire-resistant aluminum blankets to protect them from embers that could slip in through the scars of earlier fires. The tree survived, but the fire killed between 1.300 and 2.400 large sequoias across the Sierra, between 3% and 5% of the total population of large specimens, on top of similar losses from the 2020 Castle fire.
Those episodes marked a turning point: for the first time in its history, fire —the very element the sequoias need in order to reproduce— had also become an existential threat to the species, because of longer droughts, higher temperatures and an unprecedented build-up of fuel. Today the park combines active suppression of high-intensity fires with preventive prescribed burns in the most valuable groves, in an effort to make sure that these trees, some of them more than 3.000 years old, are still standing for the generations to come.