The Kings Canyon National Park Stamp

Where Kings Canyon is

Kings Canyon, for people who count parks

The oldest piece of this park dates to the first year national parks existed in number. General Grant National Park was created on October 1, 1890, the same day as Yosemite and six days after Sequoia: four square miles wrapped around one grove of giant sequoias. John Muir was already arguing in print that the deep canyon of the Kings to the east rivaled Yosemite Valley, but the canyon itself stayed unprotected for another fifty years while irrigation and power interests eyed the river for dams.

The 1940 park was won partly with a book. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes wanted the Kings country preserved as wilderness, and Ansel Adams' photographs of the high Sierra, sent to Washington in his book on the John Muir Trail, became part of the campaign that moved the administration. Franklin Roosevelt signed Kings Canyon National Park into law on March 4, 1940, absorbing little General Grant National Park. The compromise showed on the map: Cedar Grove and Tehipite Valley, the canyon floors the dam builders wanted, were left out of the park until 1965, when the fight finally ended and they were added. Since the 1940s the park has been administered jointly with Sequoia, its neighbor along a shared boundary.

The General Grant Tree carries more titles than any tree alive. It is the second-largest tree on Earth by trunk volume; only the General Sherman, over in Sequoia, is bigger. Calvin Coolidge named it the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926, and a ceremony has been held at its base each December for generations. In 1956 Eisenhower declared it a national shrine honoring America's war dead, the only living thing so designated. It stands a short walk from a parking lot, which does nothing to prepare people for the size.

The canyon is the part most visitors never reach. One road descends to the floor at Cedar Grove and stops at a place called Roads End, where the pavement simply quits and some of the largest roadless wilderness in the lower 48 begins. The deepest stretch of the canyon lies just downstream of the boundary, which is worth being honest about; the depth belongs to the river more than to the park line. The river's name is older than any of it: Spanish explorers called it El Río de los Santos Reyes, the river of the holy kings.

Official Kings Canyon park site (nps.gov)

What lives in Kings Canyon

Giant sequoias are a fire-dependent species, and this park helped prove it. Their cones are sealed shut and open with heat; fire clears the ground and thins the competition their seedlings cannot survive. Decades of fire suppression nearly stopped sequoia reproduction cold, and in the late 1960s some of the park system's first deliberate prescribed burns were set in this park to bring fire back as a tool. Redwood Mountain, inside Kings Canyon, holds the largest giant sequoia grove on Earth.

Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep are a recovery running in the high country. The Sierra's own subspecies was reduced to a remnant by disease from domestic sheep and other pressures, and is federally endangered. Reintroduced and managed herds now hold terrain in and around the park's alpine zone, and seeing one above treeline is among the rarest wildlife sightings in California.

The frog story is a quiet success. Mountain yellow-legged frogs once teemed in Sierra lakes, then vanished from most of them, hit by a lethal fungus and by decades of trout stocked into naturally fishless waters, where the fish ate the tadpoles. Crews have removed introduced trout from selected high lakes here, and frog populations have rebounded in them, one basin at a time.

Black bears run the middle elevations, mule deer summer in the meadows, and the park's vertical sweep, from foothill chaparral to alpine rock, stacks several distinct ecosystems into one map. The canyon floor at Cedar Grove and the summit plateaus above it are different worlds sharing a watershed.

The Kings Canyon designs

Kings Canyon from Roads End

The end of the road on the canyon floor, granite walls standing thousands of feet overhead and the Kings River running by. Beyond the last parking area there is only trail, into some of the largest roadless wilderness in the lower 48. For backpackers this spot is a threshold, and the stamp means the far side of it.

General Grant Tree

The second-largest tree on Earth: the Nation's Christmas Tree since 1926, a national shrine to America's war dead since 1956, and the centerpiece of the little 1890 park that Kings Canyon grew from. Photographs fail it on purpose; the only fix is to stand at the fence and look up.

Zumwalt Meadow

A green meadow on the canyon floor with the Kings River sliding past and the granite faces of the Grand Sentinel and North Dome rising some 3,500 feet on either side. It is the easy walk that shows why Muir compared this canyon to Yosemite, and on a still morning it is the best argument in the park.

How to record your Kings Canyon visit

Kings Canyon, asked and answered