Kings Canyon

Kings Canyon National Park was established in 1940 in California, on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada, and protects some 1,869 km². It is managed jointly with neighbouring Sequoia National Park, with which it forms a continuous administrative unit.

Its creation absorbed an earlier park: General Grant National Park, declared in 1890 and the fourth in the United States, was incorporated into the new Kings Canyon and ceased to exist as a separate entity. In that sector stands the General Grant, a giant sequoia more than eighty metres tall declared the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926 and a living national shrine to those who fell in war, the only tree in the country with that standing.

The park combines two very different settings. At the lower altitudes lie the groves of giant sequoia, the tree of greatest volume on the planet. And to the east lies the high Sierra: the canyon of the Kings River, one of the deepest in North America, carved by the glaciers into granite, and an enormous expanse of roadless high country, with alpine lakes, cirques and peaks above 4,000 metres. Much of the park is reachable only on foot or on horseback, and the John Muir Trail runs through it.