Chapter 7
The Big Trees
Between the heavy pine and silver fir zones towers the Big Tree (Sequoia
gigantea), the king of all the conifers in the world, "the noblest of
the noble race." The groves nearest Yosemite Valley are about twenty
miles to the westward and southward and are called the Tuolumne, Merced
and Mariposa groves. It extends, a widely interrupted belt, from a very
small grove on the middle fork of the American River to the head of Deer
Creek, a distance of about 260 miles, its northern limit being near the
thirty-ninth parallel, the southern a little below the thirty-sixth. The
elevation of the belt above the sea varies from about 5000 to 8000 feet.
From the American River to Kings River the species occurs only in small
isolated groups so sparsely distributed along the belt that three of
the gaps in it are from forty to sixty miles wide. But from Kings River
south-ward the sequoia is not restricted to mere groves but extends
across the wide rugged basins of the Kaweah and Tule Rivers in noble
forests, a distance of nearly seventy miles, the continuity of this part
of the belt being broken only by the main canyons. The Fresno, the
largest of the northern groves, has an area of three or four square
miles, a short distance to the southward of the famous Mariposa grove.
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