Explore the General Grant Sequoia Tree in Kings Canyon National Park, California

Do you love to travel to interesting places filled with impressive facts and not packed with tourists? Visit the General Grant tree in the Kings Canyon National Park off of Highway 180 in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. You can find it in the General Grant Grove of Sequoia trees about half a mile north of the Grant Grove Visitors Center.

"What's so special about the General Grant Tree?" you ask. General Grant is by volume the third largest tree in the world, and at 40 feet in diameter at its base, General Grant is also the widest known Sequoia tree. Other facts: General Grant towers into the sky at a height of 268 feet, and it has lived for seventeen hundred years. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge declared it the nation's Christmas Tree, and President Eisenhower dedicated it in 1956 as a national shrine in honor of the men and women who died for the United States.

General Grant tree does not live alone in its namesake grove. In the Grant Grove, visitors can also view a fallen and hollow Sequoia tree that served both as a cabin and a saloon, an old log cabin, General Lee tree, California Tree, Oregon Tree, Vermont Log. (In the 19th century, explorers named large trees as they found them).

Kings Canyon National Park is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California. If you drive from Northern California, you can drive to the General Grant Tree from Fresno using Highway-180 East, turn north several miles after enter the Kings Canyon National Park, and drive north towards the Kings Canyon Visitors Center and Grant Grove Village hotel. You will find the Grant Grove about a half a mile north of the visitors' center.