Unlovely but Beloved, a Giant Among Sequoias

“The Big Tree is Nature’s forest masterpiece, and, so far as I know, the greatest of living things.”

--John Muir

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Not even Joyce Kilmer would have called it lovely. The Grizzly Giant outgrew mere loveliness centuries ago. It is immense, gnarled and fire-scarred. It seems conjured by ancient witches, a behemoth 31 feet around at the base, tall as a skyscraper, tilted at twice the angle of Italy’s Tower of Pisa.

“It’s just mind-bogglingly big--it’s awesome,” says Glyn Lyford, 51, a London merchant banker who has traveled halfway around the globe to see this and other sights in Yosemite National Park.

Remembering an earlier visit to the giant sequoia, Bert Rothenbach, 35, of San Francisco has dragged three old high school friends on a seven-mile hike to stare up at the Grizzly Giant’s grotesque tangle of limbs. He stands motionless for a moment and says, “If I was here 500 years ago and came across this in the woods, I would immediately worship it as God.”

No argument issues from his friends, despite the long trek.

More than 10,000 tourists a week behold the landmark tree during the summer, and Joshua Laub, 35, of New York City is glad to be one of them.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this, and it’s beyond anything I expected,” Laub says. “I didn’t think trees got this big.”

Trees do, and a rare few get even bigger. The Grizzly Giant is not the most massive of California’s prodigious redwoods--nor, it turns out, is it the oldest. But no other living thing, plant or animal, may be quite so breathtaking.

“It really leans,” says Tim Brown, 43, of Cincinnati, who can’t believe the massive limbs. “You wouldn’t think it would be able to stand that long, leaning that way.”

It is more than just the lean, however. The tree suggests age, toughness, a power that fires the imagination. “It’s seen it all,” says Brown. “The wisdom of the forest.”

The giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, exists in a relatively few small groves, the best known of them in nearby Sequoia National Park. One tree there, the General Sherman, is thought to be the world’s largest living organism, with a volume 50% greater than the Grizzly Giant. The General Sherman is 30 feet in diameter--a foot less than the Grizzly--but is far taller at 275 feet.

The Grizzly Giant does not even crack the top 20 trees in overall volume, but many believe that is only because of a long-ago lightning strike. That, or fires, caused the tree to be stunted at 209 feet.

“Some people estimate it must have been 67 feet taller,” says Dean Shenk, a Yosemite park ranger, who finds it difficult to separate truth from fiction in Grizzly Giant lore. Despite the lack of specific scientific evidence, it is generally understood that the top of the tree was blasted away by lightning or died because of fire damage at the base.

Rangers like to point out the most prominent limb, extending straight out, then angling skyward like the arm of a traffic cop. That one limb is more than 6 feet thick. Its weight is responsible for the tree’s precarious tilt.

Park fliers put the Grizzly’s age at 2,700 years, but lately that has come into question. A man named Nate Stephenson of the U.S. Geological Survey has been recalculating ages using data from felled trees and foot-deep core samples taken from sequoias still living.

There is no precise way to establish age except by counting growth rings--which was done in the case of a tree chopped down not far away in what is now Giant Sequoia National Monument.

From that stump, scientists know that sequoias can live 3,200 years. Stephenson’s computer modeling, however, has reduced the estimated age of many large specimens. He puts the Grizzly Giant at 1,800 years, plus or minus a couple of centuries. The General Sherman--once thought to be younger than the Grizzly--is probably 2,150 years old, Stephenson says.

Named for the bears that once roamed the Sierra Nevada, the Grizzly Giant was known to Indians but unseen by white men until 150 years ago. The first photograph dates to 1859, according to Shenk. Even then, the tree was leaning.

Abraham Lincoln was so impressed by the huge trees in the Mariposa Grove that in 1864--during the Civil War, no less--he set the land aside “for the pleasuring of the people.” The grove is just inside the park’s south entrance near California 41.

Hundreds of trees of all sizes cover the sloping hillsides. Among them are many of Yosemite’s biggest, including the fallen carcass of the Wawona Tunnel Tree. Even among these colossal specimens, the Grizzly Giant is unmistakable. You have to hike to reach it, the shortest route being just under a mile, up the hillside through other trees that shield it from view.

“Then you turn a corner and see this huge giant,” says Karen Woodfaulk, 49, of Columbia, S.C. “It’s beautiful. It’s overwhelming.

“What can you say about a tree like that, except that it’s overwhelming?”

Many visitors stop as soon as they make the turn and just stare from about 100 yards away. For a moment, the trail clogs up with Karel and Mieke Van Soest and their three daughters, tourists from the Netherlands.

“I don’t know how many wooden shoes we could make out of it,” Karel quips.

The trail in places sounds like a Berlitz center. In an hour you can hear the chatter of people from France, Germany, Ireland, Japan and elsewhere. Dozens more come from throughout the United States. Ric Leno, 27, is from Boston but is about to move to New York City to train as a doctor. In the short break before beginning that chapter of his life, Leno has ended up here, lowering his camera to gaze up at the tree canted toward him.

“I’ve never seen anything like this--ever,” he says.

This stunning and immutable pillar of strength has stood through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, the voyages of Marco Polo and Columbus. It has stood through lightning and blizzards and floods and forest fires--and may still outlast us all.

Trying to comprehend that concept, says Leno, puts his own puny struggles in perspective.

“I have a hard time picturing life 50 years ago, let alone [two] thousand years.” He stops and laughs. “I can get through medical school, I guess.”