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It's tough to find, but worth the hike to Nelder Grove, home to gargantuan live and fire-singed sequoias.
(Photo: Courtesy of Friends of Nelder Grove) |
Gaze at some of the world’s tallest and oldest trees in the secluded Nelder Grove, about a 45-minute drive from Yosemite National Park but worlds away from its summer crowds. Finding the grove can be tricky (due to spotty cell coverage and dirt roads; be sure to keep a paper map handy), but the destination is well worth the effort: secluded trails that weave through more than 100 giant mature sequoias stretching hundreds of feet into the sky. Don’t miss the granddaddy of them all: Bull Buck, a 246-foot, 2,700-year-old specimen with a ground circumference of nearly 100 feet, located at the end of a mile-long, mostly flat trail. Keep an eye out for reminders of trees with shortened lifespans, such as the sequoias destroyed by fires, on the three-mile hike to the Graveyard of the Giants, as well as stumps left behind from the logging industry of decades ago.