Sequoia National Park: An Illustrated History.

Sequoia National Park: An Illustrated History

The world's three largest living things stand in neck-popping splendor in California's Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks. They are named Sherman, Washington, and Grant, and they are probably 3,000 years old. They keep company with 14,495-foot Mount Whitney, the nation's tallest peak outside Alaska, and with spectacular Kings Canyon, one of the deepest on the continent.

Sandy Keith, a Californian who has written often for this magazine, has a special sensitivity for our National Parks and other wildlands, especially this 1,300-square-mile jewel of the Sierra Nevada. Its Sequoia National Park section was established 100 years ago, in September 1890, by President Benjamin Harrison. The Kings Canyon area was given Park status in 1940.

Keith's words - and superb photos by such pros as Ed Cooper and Jeff Gnass produced on fine glossy paper - evoke not only the history of this big-tree bonanza but also its colors and sounds and patterns . . . "oak woodlands, piney forests, columned giants, fathomless canyons, rockbound passes, ice-burnished ridges, and storm-beaten sky gardens."

The reader is escorted into Tharp's Log, a fallen sequoia fashioned into a summer home, and Gamlin Cabin, another arboreal monarch used to stable cavalry horses. We roam trails ranging from easy aisles among soul-touching trees to exhausting climbs into granitic fastnesses. It is a wondrous trip, even in an armchair.