Your National Parks Author:Enos Abijah Mills, Laurence Frederick Schmeckebier Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE SEQUOIA AND THE GENERAL GRANT NATIONAL PARKS The Sequoia National Park has a crowded luxuriance of wild flowers. It abounds in varied bird-life and... more » has a number of wild sheep, bears, deer, and other animals. It has lakes, canons, and glaciated mountains. But the supreme attraction of this and the neighboring General Grant Park is the sequoia or Big Tree. Nowhere else on earth are trees found that are so large or so imposing. In places the Big Trees are attractively mixed with other forest trees. Besides the large aged trees, there are middle-aged ones, young trees, and seedlings. The General Grant Park has a sequoia that is thirty-five feet in diameter. This Park, like the Sequoia, was established principally to preserve Big Trees. Bothbecame National Parks in 1890, chiefly through the efforts of George W. Stewart. The General Grant Park has an area of four square miles, the Sequoia Park of two hundred and thirty-seven square miles. The proposition to enlarge the Sequoia National Park should meet with early consummation. The region would then embrace about twelve hundred square miles, including the present General Grant and Sequoia Parks and Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the United States, exclusive of Alaska. Near Mount Whitney are a number of other peaks. In fact, the region is the highest and most rugged section of California. Says Gilbert H. Grosvenor, editor of "The National Geographic Magazine": — Switzerland, the playground of Europe, visited annually (until 1915) by more than one hundred thousand Americans, cannot compare in attractiveness with the High Sierra of central California. Nothing in the Alps can rival the famous Yosemite Valley, which is as unique as the Grand Canon. The view fromthe summit of Mount Whitney surpasses that ...« less