The excellent visitors’ center at Lodgepole provides an informative account of the evolution of the giant sequoias, although the Lodgepole area’s ecology means none of them actually grows in the immediate vicinity.

Detour – General Shaman Tree

Reached by a short paved trail from the General’s Highway between Giant Forest and Lodgepole (and by an easy 2-mile foot trail from Giant Forest), the General Sherman Tree, discovered in 1879, is the largest sequoia of them all, with a circumference of 102.6 feet at its base.

Although nature’s handiwork tends to make statistics irrelevant, there is something indefinably special about standing face to bark with the world’s largest living thing – which the General Sherman Tree is. For good measure, the second-, fourth- and fifth-largest sequoias stand within the same grove.