Our national parks . ameter before it lost its bark. In the lastsixteen hundred and seventy-two years the in-crease in diameter was ten feet. A short distancesouth of this forest lies a beautiful grove, nowmostly included in the General Grant NationalPark. I found many shake-makers at work init, access to these magnificent woods having beenmade easy by the old mill wagon road. The Parkis only two miles square, and the largest of itsmany fine trees is the General Grant, so namedbefore the date of my first visit, twenty-eight yearsago, and said to be the largest tree in the world,though above th
Our national parks . ameter before it lost its bark. In the lastsixteen hundred and seventy-two years the in-crease in diameter was ten feet. A short distancesouth of this forest lies a beautiful grove, nowmostly included in the General Grant NationalPark. I found many shake-makers at work init, access to these magnificent woods having beenmade easy by the old mill wagon road. The Parkis only two miles square, and the largest of itsmany fine trees is the General Grant, so namedbefore the date of my first visit, twenty-eight yearsago, and said to be the largest tree in the world,though above the craggy bulging base the dia-meter is less than thirty feet. The Sanger Lum-ber Company owns nearly all the Kings Rivergroves outside the Park, and for many years themills have been spreading desolation without anyadvantage. One of the shake-makers directed me to an^^old snag biggeren Grant. It proved to be ahuge black charred stump thirty-two feet in dia-meter, the next in size to the grand monumentmentioned GENERAL GRANT SEQUOIA IN GENERAL GRANT NATIONAL PARK THE SEQUOIA 299 I found a scattered growth of Big Trees ex-tending across the main divide to within a shortdistance of Hydes Mill, on a tributary of DryCreek. The mountain ridge on the south side ofthe stream was covered from base to summit witha most superb growth of Big Trees. What apicture it made! In all my wide forest wanderingsI had seen none so sublime. Every tree of allthe mighty host seemed perfect in beauty andstrength, and their majestic domed heads, risingabove one another on the mountain slope, weremost imposingly displayed, like a range of bossyupswelling cumulus clouds on a calm sky. In this glorious forest the mill was busy, form-ing a sore, sad centre of destruction, though smallas yet, so immensely heavy was the the smaller and most accessible of the treeswere being cut. The logs, from three to ten ortwelve feet in diameter, were dragged or rolledwith long strings of oxen into a chu
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