C A LI FORM A BIG TREES 



229 



With the possible exception of a sister species, the Coast redwood, and 

 some of the Austrahan eucalypts, the higtree is unicjue among the world's 

 living arborescent plant forms. While it li\es in a land where pines and 

 firs grow to enormous size and to great age, even the largest of the latter 

 is small in comparison with the se(iuoia towering one hundred to one hun- 

 dred and fift\' feet higher, its trunk l)roader b\,- twenty or more feet, and 

 from two thousand to nearly three thousand years older. 



The North Calaveras bigtree grove was the first one discovered (1841), 

 and the renown of this tree in America and abroad prol)ably came chiefly 

 from accounts of the trees as seen there, although later from the Mariposa 

 grove. Forty or more years ago botanists and a few explorers knew in a 

 general way that the sequoia ranged from the North Cala\eras grove south- 

 ward in the Sierras to the Tule River country, but until quite recently 

 we have had no published account of the exact location and extent of all 

 of the existing "groves" and "forests." Singularly enough however, the 

 locations of these trees, so long imknown to published literature, were 

 familiar to the early back country settlers and lumbermen, and particidarly 



Lofi riittiiifrs and liroki'ii, waste trunks on cut-over bigtrco land near sawmill, 

 Sequoia Natit)nal I''()rost. 



