About 30 feet in diameter and standing more than 300 feet tall, the giant sequoia ranks among the planet's most majestic living things. We saw a bunch of them this past weekend, along with redwoods, cedars and pines, in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
The sequoias in this grove are between 800 and 3,000 years old. Neither fires, insects nor lightning have thwarted them. Humans, on the other hand, are another story. In the late 1800s a party of Californians stripped the bark off a sequoia chunk by chunk and reassembled it. Then they set out on a U.S. and European tour -- P.T. Barnum style -- to show the world what big trees they have in California.
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