Walt Disney’s Mineral King

It was a Friday. It was about week before Christmas. And it was official: The U.S. Forest Service awarded the right to develop the Mineral King area of Sequoia National Forest to Walt Disney Productions. The year was 1965.

A wire service article quoted Walt Disney: “When I first saw Mineral King five years ago, I thought it was one of the most beautiful spots I had ever seen and we want to keep it that way.” To Walt Disney, that meant a self-contained “Alpine Village” designed to preserve the natural beauty of valley.

Other people wanted “to keep it that way” too. But to them it meant no development at all.

LA TIMES: Covering the Sierra High Route by ski

Snow on Sequoia

A blanket of early winter snow covered the rocks and skirted the giant redwood trees in Sequoia National Park on Thanksgiving weekend. But despite it being a four-day holiday, few people trudged along the park’s trails; only the lonely sound of a steady breeze rustling tree branches filled the air; and just a few tourists stopped by the Lodgepole Visitor Center.

Maybe it’s not fair to describe nearby Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks as the sometimes overlooked stepsisters to the more popular Yosemite National Park, located to the north. But year-round, the two parks receive fewer visitors, and have fewer and more subtle attractions.

However, to Sequoia and Kings Canyon fans, those are the parks’ strengths, not their weaknesses. A visit to the parks, located in the Sierra Nevada east of Visalia, is a more intimate, personal encounter with nature, compared to a visit to a tourist-packed park.

And the intimacy of Sequoia and Kings Canyon is at its best in the winter.  <READ MORE>

General Sherman Tree Trail, Sequoia National Park

Come and see the largest tree (by volume) in the world! The General Sherman Tree is 274.9’ (83.8 meters) tall, and 102.6’ (31.3 meters) in circumference at its base. Other trees in the world are taller or have a greater circumference, but the General Sherman Tree wins by volume of wood, (52,500 cubic feet  or 1486.6 cubic meters).

There are many ways to get to the General Sherman Tree. In summer, take a free shuttle to this and other popular destinations in Sequoia National Park. Otherwise, there are two places to park, including a handicapped accessible parking lot.  <READ MORE>

The Mountains That Made the Man

A portfolio by Peter Essick pays tribute to Ansel Adams and the craggy California wilderness named in his honor.

By Robert M. Poole

Photograph by Peter Essick

On his first trip to the Sierra Nevada, in June of 1916, Ansel Adams went armed with a camera—a Kodak No. 1 Brownie—and started shooting. “I expect to be broke if I keep up the rate I am taking pictures,” the budding 14-year-old photographer wrote to his Aunt Mary in San Francisco that summer. “I have taken 30 already.”

He kept shooting for almost seven decades, until his death at age 82 in 1984, by which time he had become a world-famous photographer and a powerful voice for wilderness. Although he traveled far and wide, he returned again and again to the Sierra—”a noble gesture of the earth,” in his phrase—for the adventure, artistic inspiration, friendship, and solace he found among its jagged granite peaks, snow-swept passes, and brooding skies. His uncompromising portrayal of these subjects still draws pilgrims to the wilderness that bears his name, deep in the heart of the High Sierra, in hopes of seeing what Ansel Adams saw there.  <Read more>