Sequoia National Park Map showing the locale of Sequoia National Park Map showing the locale of Sequoia National Park Website Sequoia National Park Sequoia National Park is a nationwide park in the southern Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, California, in the United States.
The park spans 404,064 acres (631.35 sq mi; 163,518.90 ha; 1,635.19 km2). Encompassing a vertical relief of nearly 13,000 feet (4,000 m), the park contains among its natural resources the highest point in the adjoining 48 United States, Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet (4,418 m) above sea level.
The park is south of and adjoining with Kings Canyon National Park; the two are administered by the National Park Service together as the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
The park is famous for its enormous sequoia trees, including the General Sherman tree, the biggest tree on Earth.
The Giant Forest is connected by the Generals Highway to Kings Canyon National Park's General Grant Grove, home to the General Grant tree among other enormous sequoias.
The park's enormous sequoia forests are part of 202,430 acres (81,921 ha) of old-growth forests shared by Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Indeed, the parks preserve a landscape that still resembles the southern Sierra Nevada before Euro-American settlement. 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.
The vast majority of the park is roadless wilderness; no road crosses the Sierra Nevada inside 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.
Covering the highest-elevation region of the High Sierra, the backcountry includes Mount Whitney on the easterly border of the park, accessible from the Giant Forest via the High Sierra Trail.
Continuing along the High Sierra Trail over the Great Western Divide via Kaweah Gap, one passes from the Kaweah River Drainage, with its characteristic V-shaped river valleys, and into the Kern River drainage, where an ancient fault line has aided glaciers in the last ice age to problematic a U-shaped canyon that is almost perfectly straight for nearly 20 miles (32 km).
At Mount Whitney, the High Sierra Trail meets with the John Muir Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, which continue northward along the Sierra crest and into the backcountry of Kings Canyon National Park.
The region which now comprises Sequoia National Park was first home to Monachee (or Western Mono) Native Americans, who resided mainly in the Kaweah River drainage in the Foothills region of the park, though evidence of cyclic surroundingion exists even as high as the Giant Forest.
The first European settler to homestead in the region was Hale Tharp, who famously assembled a home out of a hollowed-out declined enormous sequoia log in the Giant Forest next to Log Meadow.
The National Park Service incorporated the Giant Forest into Sequoia National Park in 1890, the year of its founding, promptly ceasing all logging operations in the Giant Forest.
The park has period a several times over the decades to its present size; one of the most recent expansions occurred in 1978, when grassroots accomplishments, spearheaded by the Sierra Club, fought off attempts by the Walt Disney Corporation to purchase a high-alpine former quarrying site south of the park for use as a ski resort.
Its name dates back to early 1873 when the miners in the region formed the Mineral King Mining District. Mineral King is the highest-elevation advanced site inside the park and a prominent destination for backpackers.
Sequoia National Park contains a momentous portion of the Sierra Nevada.
It is the mountain peaks of the Great Western Divide that greet visitors in Mineral King and that can be seen from Moro Rock and the Giant Forest area.
Between these mountain peaks lie deep canyons, including Tokopah Valley above Lodgepole, Deep Canyon on the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River and deep in the park's backcountry, Kern Canyon, which is more than 5,000 feet (1,500 m) deep for 30 miles (48 km). Park caves, like most caves in the Sierra Nevada of California, are mostly solutional caves dissolved from marble.
The batholith's rapid uplift over the past 10 million years led to a rapid erosion of the metamorphic rocks in the higher elevations, exposing the granite beneath; therefore, most Sierra Nevada caves are found in the middle and lower elevations (below 7,000 ft or 2,100 m), though some caves are found in the park at elevations as high as 10,000 ft (3,000 m) such as the White Chief cave and Cirque cave in Mineral King.
These caves are carved out of the modern by the abundant cyclic streams in the park; most of the larger park caves presently have or have had sinking streams running through them.
The caves in the park include California's longest cave at over 20 miles (32 km), Lilburn Cave, as well as recently identified caves that remain strictly off-limits to all but a handful of specialists who visit on rare occasions to study cave geology and biology.
The only commercial cave open to park visitors remains Crystal Cave, the park's second-longest at over 3.4 miles (5.5 km) and remarkably well-preserved for the volume of visitation it receives annually.
The most recently identified primary cave in the park, in September 2006, has been titled Ursa Minor. Park caves are valued by scientists and cavers alike for their pristine beauty, range, and endemic cave life.
Sherman Tree Trail An 0.8-mile roundtrip paved trail that descends from the parking lot to the base of the General Sherman tree and meanders through a grove of enormous sequoia trees.
Tunnel Log is a declined enormous sequoia tree in Sequoia National Park.
Crescent Meadow is a small, sequoia-rimmed meadow in the Giant Forest region of Sequoia National Park.
Moro Rock is a granite dome positioned in the center of the park, at the head of Moro Creek, between Giant Forest and Crescent Meadow.
Giant Forest Museum offers knowledge about enormous sequoias and human history in the forest.
National Register of Historic Places listings in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks a b c This article incorporates enhance domain material from the National Park Service document "Geology Overview".
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sequoia National Park.
Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Sequoia National Park.
NPS: official Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks website a map showing the different areas with enormous sequoia trees, including the Sequoia National Forest and the Sequoia National Park Geologic Map of Southwestern Sequoia National Park, Tulare County, California United States Geological Survey Sequoia National Park Webcam Sequoia National Park Webcam time lapse animations QTVRs in Sequoia National Park Sequoia National Park
Categories:
IUCN Category IISequoia National Park - Biosphere reserves of the United States - Campgrounds in California - Forest history - National parks in California - Old expansion forests - Parks in Tulare County, California - Protected areas established in 1890 - Protected areas of the Sierra Nevada (U.S.)History of the Sierra Nevada (U.S.)Sierra Nevada (U.S.)1890 establishments in California
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