Chapter 9
Section 9 of Birds and All Nature, Volume 6, Number 2, September 1899. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Christine Lehman, Reseda, California. Awesome Trees We made a side trip to the big trees of the Mariposa Group, which are about one hour's
ride from the hotel, says a correspondent of the Pittsburgh Dispatch. If the smallest of these trees could be planted anywhere in Pennsylvania, the railroads would run excursion trains to it and make money. The trees in this grove are so large that it takes a good while to fully appreciate the facts about the size of the biggest of them. The grizzly giant is thirty-four feet through at the base and over four hundred feet high. This tree would overtop the spires on the
Pittsburgh Cathedral by over one hundred feet. The trunk of this tree is one hundred feet clear to the first limb, which is twenty feet in circumference. Many other trees here are very nearly as large as this one, and there are four hundred in the grove. Through several, tunnels have been cut, and a four-horse stage can go through these tunnels on the run and never graze a hub. You get an approach to an adequate idea of their size by walking off one hundred yards or so while
the stage is standing at the foot of a tree and glancing from top to bottom, keeping the stage in mind as a means of comparison. The stage and the horses look like the little tin outfit that Santa Claus brought you when you were a good little boy. These trees are no longer to be called the largest in the world, however. A species of eucalyptus has been found in Australia as large or larger. Emerson warns us against the use of the superlative, but when you are in this
region of the globe, you can't get along without a liberal use of it. He himself says of Yosemite, It is the only spot I have ever found that came up to the Bragg. And as I stood in the big tree grove, I remembered that someone called Emerson himself the sequoia of the human race.
