Sequoia National Park Information
Visiting Sequoia National Park
Home to the largest tree in the world, the deepest canyon in the country, and the tallest mountain peak in the lower 48 states, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks are truly special places found nowhere else on Earth.
The great John Muir wrote in 1891, "In the vast Sierra wilderness far to the southward of the famous Yosemite Valley, there is a yet grander valley of the same kind." The famed naturalist was writing of the area now known as Sequoia National Park.
Sequoia is one of California's most spectacular (and least-visited) treasures. Nowhere else is the Sierra so high. Nowhere else are the canyons so rugged and deep. And nowhere else does the Sierra rise so steeply from the west.
Here you'll find giant trees and great canyons. The scale is grand; the park rises from 1,300 feet to 14,494 feet (at the summit of Mt. Whitney, highest point in the lower 48 states). Speaking of superlatives, here you’ll also find the largest tree on the planet (the epic General Sherman Tree), by some measures the country's deepest canyon (Kings Canyon), and the second-largest road-free wilderness area in the United States. And under it all, hundreds of marble caves and caverns, many teeming with rare plants and animals.
The bottom-to-tip topography means dramatic changes in scenery, diverse plants and animals, steep roads and trails, and snowmelt-fed rivers racing down from mountain peaks.
But even the most well-illustrated field guide can’t do justice to the intangible power and peace that visitors feel as they wander Sequoia National Park, the second-oldest in the U.S.
View the NPS 2013 Fact Sheet for Sequoia and Kings Canyon or the NPS Spring 2013 Visitor Guide for the lastest news and information.
