Merry Christmas

Sequoia National Park, CA
Canon PowerShot SX40 HS, 1/160s, f/4.0, ISO: 200

The General Grant is the third largest tree on the planet.  It's a giant sequoia in Kings Canyon National Park in the California Sierras.  President Calvin Coolidge declared it to be America's Christmas Tree.  I thought it would be appropriate to a use a picture of it for today's post.

There's just one problem.

I don't have any pictures of the General Grant.  I've never even seen that tree.  By the time I get to that section of the Sequoia/Kings Canyon parks I'm always big tree'd out and I don't feel like making the short hike for one more picture of an orange tree trunk.  Mind you, hiking through the sequoias is a fantastic way to spend a day, and for those who believe in that sort of thing it might even be a mystical experience.  It's just that if you work the parks South to North (which seems to be the normal thing to do) then the General Grant tree is likely to be one of the last stops before heading home, and at least in my experience it suffers accordingly.

So, I give you instead the General Sherman.  It's the largest living tree in the world (based on trunk volume).  It's not the big tree in the foreground of the picture, it's the big tree in the center of the background.  It's 36 feet wide and 275 feet tall.  That's a big tree.

Interestingly enough, the emergence of the Sequoia as the largest living tree is a relatively recent phenomenon.  One hundred years ago the award would have gone to a coastal redwood.  The Crannell Creek Giant was 17% larger in volume than the General Sherman.  It was cut down for lumber in 1926.  There are records of other redwoods from the turn of the century that also eclipsed the General Sherman in volume.  They are all gone, of course.