300 Recreations of a Sportsman 



climate of California. Their seeds are extremely 

 small and light, a singular fact when their vast 

 size is taken into consideration. Only a few 

 years ago they were unknown except to the 

 trapper and the few Indians, but now the park 

 is visited by thousands who live and camp here 

 far into the fall. 



There is a great difference in the age and 

 appearance of the trees. One of the largest 

 measures one hundred and sixty feet in circum- 

 ference, and like a king, it seems to stand alone 

 amid fitting surroundings. It rises in a little 

 valley at the headwaters of the Kaweah Eiver, 

 and is surrounded by scenes that for beauty 

 and majesty have no counterpart, at least in 

 America. If Nature had selected this site as a 

 throne for this king of trees she could not have 

 succeeded better. On almost every side deep 

 abysmal precipices stand as though to entrap 

 any one who should approach, deep canons which 

 wind about; and beyond these peaks and moun- 

 tains that reach ten or fifteen thousand feet into 

 the empyrean. Around about these solitary trees 

 stretches a wilderness which for wildness and pic- 

 turesqueness hardly has its equal. One might 

 imagine that Nature had selected this last resort 

 of the great sequoia and built up its defence, 

 thrown about its castellated form a moat of in- 

 finite depth, walls of colossal height, buried it 

 deep in the heart of titanic mountains safe from 



