The California Tunnel Tree. Tunnel was carved through the tree in 1895 as a way to promote the grove. Originally, it could accommodate a car. Since that time, the bark has been growing inward in an attempt to close its wound.
Things move slowly around here. On October 13, 2010 the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County finally opened its doors. It took 17 years to plan and build. The museum celebrates the era when massive wooly mammoths, saber tooth cats and dire wolves roamed the region. Last Thursday, I joined two friends and spent the day wandering among the last living relics of that time.
Located just up the hill from our home in Yosemite National Park, the giant sequoias of the Mariposa Grove represent just a tiny slice of the massive forests of sequoias that scientists believe once stretched across this part of California. Their growth is even slower than that of the Fossil Discovery Center. Stretching up and out at a rate of just inches a year, it has taken some of these beauties almost 3,000 years to reach their present girth and height. It was worth the wait. As their heartfelt guardian Galen Clark wrote more than 100 years ago, "Here it seems one is standing in a great temple, silent, restful, with the air seemingly filled with eternal peace."
The Grizzly. The first branch on the right has grown vertically. Its diameter is larger than the trunk of any non sequoia in the grove.
Not everyone saw it that way. Just a couple of miles away, in an area now called the Nelder Grove, the Madera Flume and Trading Company tried logging these giants. The results were disastrous. The trunks were so massive that it took days and several men with massive saws to cut down a single tree. When the sequoia fell, the ground shook with the intensity of an earthquake, shattering the tree into thousands of pieces -- useful for making only shingles, pencils and matchsticks.