Grizzly Giant

More than four fifths of this tree's bark and sapwood has burned away over the centuries, and it is still alive. The Grizzly Giant has taken fire after fire and kept growing on what was left. It is the oldest tree in the Mariposa Grove. The park service calls it the 3,000-year-old Grizzly Giant, and the estimate cited on Wikipedia is more careful, 2,995 years give or take 250. A band five centuries wide is as close as anyone gets with a living sequoia, and even its young end is older than almost anything else you can walk up to. It is not the biggest. A 1990 measurement ranked it the 26th largest living giant sequoia, 63.7 metres tall with a trunk 29.5 metres round. What it has instead is character: the whole tree leans about five and a half metres off vertical, carried on a trunk that fire has stripped of most of its bark. The publisher James Hutchings named it the Grizzled Giant in 1859. By 1888 people were calling it the Grizzly Giant, and that name stuck. It anchors the Grizzly Giant Loop Trail, about a mile, or 1.6 kilometres, from the Arrival Area. In season a free shuttle runs there from the Mariposa Grove Welcome Plaza; otherwise it is a walk of about three kilometres each way. Visitors with a disability placard may drive to the Grizzly Giant parking area.