Nature vs. Disneyland
My recreational Mecca was the quietest National Park I have ever visited, Sequoia National Park, the best-kept secret in the National Park System.
White men first saw the sequoias in 1806 when Spaniard Gabriel Moraga found them while looking for a place to create a mission. Sequoia National Park was created in l890 at the prompting of John Muir and George Stewart, editor of the Visalia Delta. It is the second National Park after Yellowstone. Sequoia was joined by adjacent Kings Canyon in 1940 to become Sequoia & Kings Canyon with a combined acreage of 865,257 acres. The park lies next to the John Muir Wilderness Area, making the whole area the second largest wilderness in the U.S. Some 330 animal species, 1,439 plant species, and 48 different species of trees call this area “home.” It is Nature.
Yosemite National Park, to the north, has become Disneyland. Cars line up like the L.A. Freeway on Friday afternoon waiting to get into the park. Clouds of car exhaust, then crowded parking lots, and, when you finally set foot in the park, there are crowds of people as if you're at the county fair. Twelve months of the year there is a waiting list for rooms and camping sites at Yosemite. When I was at Sequoia NP in mid-June, the 102 rooms of the beautiful new Wuksachi Lodge were about half-full in mid-week. The nearby Lodgepole campground seemed less than half full. The park staff said that you do need reservations for rooms and camping from July 4 weekend through Labor Day, but otherwise there is always room and the park is open year-round. (Between you and me, let's keep all this a secret, okay.)
It's possible to visit Sequoia as a day trip from Fresno, to stand in the front of the giant trees and take your picture and go home. If all you have is a day to visit a place like this then by all means do so, but do not expect to find the usual trinket shops and tourist accommodations that are found in some other parks.
Enlightened Park Planning
Until just a few years ago Sequoia had nearly 300 buildings tucked among the trees of the Giant Forest. Thanks to an enlightened park administration, 282 have been removed, along with more than a million square feet of asphalt. A new Giant Forest Museum, which will open this summer, has been built, but otherwise the ravens, chipmunks, marmots, and deer have been restored to being the permanent residents of the giant Sequoia grove. And, by the end of this summer, if you want to get close to the General Sherman Tree, you will have to park a distance away and walk or take a shuttle bus.
Campgrounds, Park store, and Wucksachi Lodge, all run by concessionaire Delaware North Park Services, have been sited several miles away from the giant trees to preserve the sanctuary of the trees. Delaware North Park Services, which operates Wuksachi Lodge, plans to expand its overnight room capacity to over 400, but the additional bunks will be located in small lodges set in the woods surrounding the central restaurant and meeting rooms, so the natural landscape dominates the panoramic views of the surrounding mountains. This place is almost natural. It makes you want to stay to enjoy it.
I, for one, cheer this approach to National Park planning. National Parks and monuments are created to preserve extraordinary natural beauty, and plant and animal life. They should be accessible, but if you make them too accessible then you love them to death and their value as ecological reserves, as well as recreational sites and heritage treasures, is diminished.
The rangers at Sequoia also understand the place of fire in ecology. They do not try to control fires in the park unless flames threaten the grove with the General Sherman Tree. In fact, the Park Service sometimes sets controlled burns, which aid the regeneration of sequoia trees.
Sequoias are returning to a more natural state, but there is one problem they haven't solved yet — bears. As in Yosemite and Yellowstone, sequoias have a problem with black bears. (The grizzly has been extinct from California since l920.) The Park Service estimates that there are 400 black bears in the park. Bears are omnivores. They eat green plants in meadows, berries, termites, and even yellow-jacket nests. They also eat road-kill, catch small deer, and dig for rodents. The adult females can reach nearly 300 pounds and the males can weigh up to 400 pounds. A bear is an eating machine.
In the wild, bears are shy. This behavior is the result of centuries of mutual predation with humans. When you protect bears, their behavior changes. Rangers report some bruins have literally waited at the entrance to the campgrounds for cars to pull in and then followed them to the campsite. You get out; the bear waits until you have stepped away from the car, and then plunges into the car through the open door. If food is visible or strong-scented, the bear makes his move, bolted doors and windows notwithstanding.
The General Sherman Tree
Bears have broken car windows and doors to go after breath mints or even a stale French fry that has fallen under the seat. Each campsite has a metal lockbox to hold food.
The rangers try to trap and relocate “problem bears,” but some stubborn ones keep coming back to the campground. Four bears had to be killed by rangers last year in Sequoia.
The only campground in Sequoia & Kings Canyon that has few bear problems is near the General Grant Tree grove, which is adjacent to some private land where hunting is allowed. This raises a question: If we are going to restore National Parks to more natural conditions, then shouldn't we permit some hunting in the parks? Man has been a natural predator of bears for thousands of years. Isn't hunting more “natural” than not hunting?
Obviously, such a policy would be a matter of politics, and politics certainly do shape the fate of our parks, as Sequoia amply demonstrates. In 1879, pioneer cattleman James Wolverton named the largest sequoia the “General Sherman tree” to honor the general under whom he had served during the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman. Good that he did so. In October 1885, 53 members of a group of San Francisco socialists laid claim to the Giant Forest and surrounds under provisions of the Timber and Stone Act of 1878. They originally called themselves the Co-Operative Land Purchase and Colonization Association of San Francisco. Later they took the name Kaweah Co-Operative Commonwealth Company, or the Kaweah Colony. They put a lot of effort into luring tourists and tried, unsuccessfully, to have the General Sherman Tree re-named the “Karl Marx Tree.”
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
