Greetings family, friends and neighbors. Have you driven through a mighty Sequoia tree? Today's ramble is about the destructive practice, beginning in the late 1800's, of entrepreneurs creating California's earliest roadside attractions by cutting tunnels through the worlds oldest living things. Here's more to the story......Bill 

Historical Ramblings 

CALIFORNIA’S TUNNEL TREES 

In 1881 The Yosemite Stage and Turnpike Company payed the Scribner Brothers $75 to enlarge an existing fire scar in a Giant Sequoia tree in Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove large enough to accommodate a team of horses and a fully loaded stage coach. The twenty three hundred year old Wawona Tunnel Tree became the subject of countless photographs, a widely known attraction, and by 1916 a National Park Service icon designed to increase tourism in the age of automobiles. James Sperry, owner of the 

Murphy’s Hotel near Calaveras Big Trees, convinced the property owner to cut through the partially burnt hollow trunk of the parks Pioneer Log Cabin Tree to compete for tourists with Yosemite’s Wawona Tunnel Tree. Sperry ordered that a large enough opening be cut in the thousand year old tree for visitor’s conveyances to pass through. Sequoia National Park opted for a fallen Tunnel Log for cars to through when a Giant Sequoia fell across a park road in 1938. Shrine Drive Thru Tree and the nearby Chandler Tree are privately owned Coastal Redwood drive through attractions that gained attention with the completion of the Redwood Highway’s Avenue of the Giants. The most recent California tunnel tree was cut through a coast redwood in 1976 in Klamath for privately owned roadside attraction Tour Thru Tree Park. 

The Wawona Tree flourished for twenty one hundred years, but only survived another eighty eight summers once it became a tourist attraction. Heavy snow, wet soil, and weakening caused by 

tunneling caused the iconic tree to fall in 1969 during a severe winter storm. The hollow, lightning and fire ravaged Pioneer Cabin Tree, tunneled to attract hotel business, had hung on to life for more than a thousand years until 2017 when it could no longer stand. 

Our expectations of National Parks have changed immensely during the past half 

century. When our parks were young, cutting tunnels through sequoia trees was a 

way to popularize the parks and gain support for their protection. In those early days, 

national parks usually were managed to protect individual features rather than to 

protect the integrity of the complete environment. Today we realize that our national 

parks represent some of the last primeval landscapes in America, and our goal in the 

parks is to allow nature to run it’s course with as little interference from humans as 

possible. Tunnel trees had their time and place in the early history of our national 

parks, But today sequoias which are standing healthy and whole are worth far more. 

-National Park Service. 

-Bill 9/24