298 OUR NATIONAL PARKS 



cutting into the heart, and counting the wood- 

 rings with the aid of a lens. I made out a little 

 over four thousand without difficulty or doubt, 

 but I was unable to get a complete count, owing 

 to confusion in the rings where wounds had been 

 healed over. Judging by what is left of it, this 

 was a fine, tall, symmetrical tree nearly forty feet 

 in diameter before it lost its bark. In the last 

 sixteen hundred and seventy-two years the in- 

 crease in diameter was ten feet. A short distance 

 south of this forest lies a beautiful grove, now 

 mostly included in the General Grant National 

 Park. I found many shake-makers at work in 

 it, access to these magnificent woods having been 

 made easy by the old mill wagon road. The Park 

 is only two miles square, and the largest of its 

 many fine trees is the General Grant, so named 

 before the date of my first visit, twenty-eight years 

 ago, and said to be the largest tree in the world, 

 though above the craggy bulging base the dia- 

 meter is less than thirty feet. The Sanger Lum- 

 ber Company owns nearly all the Kings River 

 groves outside the Park, and for many years the 

 mills have been spreading desolation without any 

 advantage. 



One of the shake-makers directed me to an 

 "old snag biggeren Grant." It proved to be a 

 huge black charred stump thirty-two feet in dia- 

 meter, the next in size to the grand monument 

 mentioned above. 



