more than 860,000 acres (348,000 hectares) of mountainous terrain, most visitors explore the road-accessible destinations scattered along the parks’ two main arteries: Generals Highway and CA Highway 180/Kings Canyon Scenic Byway.
Generals Highway begins at the Ash Mountain Entrance, east of Three Rivers, and threads a spectacular, winding ascent to the Giant Forest plateau. Generals Highway continues north through Lodgepole, Dorst Creek Campground, the Stony Creek Recreation Area, and access points to Giant Sequoia National Monument and the Jennie Lakes Wilderness before connecting with the Kings Canyon Scenic Byway just east of Kings Canyon National Park’s Big Stump Entrance. After passing through Grant Grove, the byway descends into the depths of Kings Canyon before terminating at Roads End, a popular backcountry portal. A separate road covered within this guide, Mineral King Road, winds its way to Mineral King Valley, a subalpine mountain paradise boasting trails to several stunning lake basins.
GEOLOGY: THE RISE OF THE SIERRA NEVADA
The story of the Sierra Nevada begins with plate tectonics. Plate tectonics theory describes the earth’s crust as a series of large moving plates that continually bump and grind against each other. This bumping and grinding shapes the surface of the earth by thrusting mountains upward, dragging valleys downward, and creating subterranean volcanic activity that creates the rocks that sometimes make their way to the earth’s surface.
RISE UP, BATHOLITH!
Around one hundred to two hundred million years ago, the Pacific Plate began to slide underneath the North American Plate in a process known as subduction. As the subducted Pacific Plate sank and melted into the earth’s mantle, a large pool of magma rose toward the surface and formed a large granitic mass, known as a batholith, about 10 miles (16.2 km) below the surface. Millions of years later, tectonic forces lifted the batholith toward the earth’s surface. As the batholith rose, overlying metamorphic rock composed of ancient ocean sediments eroded. New watercourses carried the overlying rock westward, filling the Central Valley and exposing the underlying granite.
Within the last three million years, the Sierra Nevada batholith began to tilt, with the western edge of the range sinking and the eastern side of the range rising. The disproportionate tilt in the Sierra Nevada is evident when one views the range from both the Central Valley and the Owens Valley. From the Central Valley, one observes gently swelling foothills that rise to the conifer belt before culminating at the Great Western Divide. From the Owens Valley, one observes a severe, precipitous wall of granite known as an escarpment that steeply descends more than 8000 feet (2450 m) from the Sierra Crest down to the Owens Valley floor.
THE MICHELANGELO OF THE NATURAL WORLD
The Sierra Nevada’s sculpted appearance is the result of extensive glacial activity during past ice ages. Slow-moving glaciers scoured rock out of preexisting depressions and canyons, sometimes peeling away huge volumes of land and leaving sheer cliff faces. Beneath the cliffs, U-shaped valleys, such as Kings Canyon and Kern Canyon, formed as the glaciers pushed through, clearing out massive quantities of rock and carrying it down canyon. Smaller glaciers in the high country gouged out basins and valleys and sculpted the sharp pinnacles of the range’s peaks. Many of these peaks still hold small, remnant glaciers and icefields on their northeast facing slopes, although that number continues to dwindle as the climate warms.
Small pockets of ancient metamorphic rock cap the much younger granite of Big Baldy Ridge (Route 28).
HUMAN HISTORY
Humans have inhabited the southern Sierra Nevada for up to seven thousand years. Various tribes of the Monache (or Western Mono) people inhabited flats along the five forks of the Kaweah River, while the Yokut people inhabited similar habitats around the Kings River watershed. Both peoples maintained seasonal villages in the foothills and higher elevations, and tribes traveled between the two throughout the year.
After European American prospectors discovered gold throughout the Sierra, opportunistic explorers flooded into the various canyons and valleys of the range. The first explorer of European origin to encounter the sequoias of Giant Forest was a man by the name of Hale Tharp. The Monache of Buckeye Flat helped treat Tharp’s companion for injuries at what is now known as Hospital Rock, and Monache guides later led Tharp to Giant Forest, where Tharp would eventually establish a seasonal cattle ranch at Log Meadow before ultimately becoming an advocate for protecting the sequoias. Although Tharp’s influence in advocating protection was vital for the parks’ future, his arrival ultimately heralded the decline and exodus of the indigenous peoples in the area.
Word about the trees quickly got out, and Bay Area lumbermen, already familiar with the exceptional timber provided by coast redwoods, set their sights on the sequoia groves as a means of satisfying San Francisco’s insatiable desire for construction material. Within a matter of decades, the more accessible groves in the Kings River watershed—including the Converse Basin Grove—fell victim to wholesale logging operations. At the same time, the Kaweah Colony, a socialist utopian experiment set on funding their livelihood with sequoia timber, began constructing the old Colony Mill Road from the North Fork Kaweah River to the Giant Forest plateau. Ironically, sequoia timber is uniquely unsuitable for construction, owing to the brittle composition of the wood. When felled, sequoias shatter on impact, leaving only about 25 percent of the tree suitable for timber. And even that wood was suitable for little more than shingles, grapevine stakes, and perhaps most tragic of all, toothpicks.
An unlikely alliance of conservation efforts—spearheaded by John Muir—and agricultural interests concerned about the agricultural impacts of logging successfully petitioned Congress to create federal protections for the Grant Grove area and Giant Forest, and in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation establishing Sequoia National Park and Grant Grove National Park. The legislation shut out the Kaweah Colony, which abandoned its efforts to complete the Colony Mill Road near present-day Crystal Cave Road.
US Army Cavalry troops were tasked with protecting the parks, but after several years of inconsistent and unfocused efforts, command was transferred to Colonel Charles Young, the third African American graduate of West Point. Young would become a formative figure in Sequoia’s early history after completing the Colony Mill Road project and opening up Giant Forest to wheeled transportation for the first time. Over time, Colony Mill Road proved to be insufficient for increasing automobile traffic, and by 1926, the newly minted National Park Service had completed the Generals Highway, which would later extend north to connect with the Kings Canyon Scenic Byway in 1935.
Meanwhile, the ever-thirsty metropolis of Los Angeles had set its sights on obtaining water from the Kings River, which engineers considered ideal for water storage and hydroelectric power potential. The plan was to establish a series of reservoirs within Kings Canyon and Tehipite Valley to store water for use by the city. After a furious battle between Southern California water interests and the ultimately victorious environmental lobby, Congress created legislation to combine Kings Canyon and most of its rugged watershed with Grant Grove National Park and a newly acquired parcel containing the Redwood Mountain Groves to form a new Kings Canyon National Park in 1940. Because it abuts Sequoia National Park along the Kings-Kaweah and Kings-Kern Divides, the National Park Service manages both parks conjointly as one massive mountain park.
