Kings Canyon National Park &
Sequoia National Park - California

Established September 25, 1890; March 4, 1940

863,741 acres

Bigness—big trees and big canyons— inspired the separate founding of each of these parks. In 1943 Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks began to be jointly administered. The two contiguous parks form one superpark 66 miles long and 36 miles at its widest point.

Nearly every square mile of this vast park is wilderness. A backpacker here can hike to a spot that is farther from a road than any other place in the 48 contiguous states. But visitors can easily reach Sequoia Park's famed attraction, the Giant Forest of sequoias.

Relatively few visitors hike any of the parks' hundreds of miles of trails. Still, there are enough backpackers to worry officials, who protect the backcountry by regulating the number of people entering it.

Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet the highest peak in the United States south of Alaska, rises at the border. Backpackers coming in from the east can get to Whitney in 1 or 2 days. From the park's western trailheads, backpackers reach it by a 70-mile, 8-day trek across the park's snow-swept, glacier-dotted heights.

Visitors are startled to learn that the smoke they sometimes see rises from "prescribed burning"—controlled fires deliberately set by park employees to help the sequoias by removing undergrowth. In the past, when the park fought all fires, brush and deadwood built up. This fueled fires that imperiled the sequoias, which resist flames at their bases but can die if fire attacks their crowns.