The President

The oldest known living giant sequoia stands on a trail loop a short walk from General Sherman. The President is reckoned at roughly 3,200 years, a figure that came out of an extensive measuring campaign in 2011 and 2012. That same work made it one of the most thoroughly measured trees on Earth. Count trunk and branches together and it is the second-largest tree known: about 1,278 cubic metres of trunk and some 255 more in limbs. Count the trunk alone and it slips a few places down the list, which is why rankings of the biggest trees do not agree on where to put it. Both numbers are honest. They are measuring different things. It was named in 1923 for Warren G. Harding, the sitting president, by which point it had already been standing for around three thousand years. Fire has been through here many times in that span, and the prominent white burn scar on its north side is the record of it. The crown is unusually dense for a tree this old, and the first large limb does not branch out until 37 metres up. It stands on the paved Congress Trail, reached from the Sherman Tree parking lot, about 140 feet downhill from the Chief Sequoyah Tree. The park charges at the gate; the tree itself asks nothing.