The Buckman family were Tulare County pioneers, arriving here in the late 1800s. The journey of those early settlers in covered wagons through mile upon mile of rough, uneven primitive land is an important part of our heritage; and it led to the creation of the Hogwallow Preserve – to protect in perpetuity some of that wild hogwallow land as it appeared for hundreds of thousands of years before intensive farming began.

     My father, Dr. Phil Buckman, purchased 40 acres of hogwallow property near Lindcove sight unseen in 1943. But he knew what he was getting. He knew the region well, having traveled through it every summer from his boyhood home in Exeter to the cool High Sierra country of Mineral King. He supported his college education by operating the Mineral King Pack Station during the summer months before graduating and eventually returning to Exeter to practice medicine.

     To him, the hogwallow land was much more than just a piece of property. It was one of his favorite places. He was humbled by the panoramic view of the Sierra Nevada that included Homer’s Nose and Sawtooth Peak. He used the clay soil to make the adobe bricks for his impressive home. He grazed livestock on the hogwallows’ mounds and swales and hunted quail. He appreciated the unique land’s rare plants, animals, and vernal pools, and its changing beauty in each season. He enjoyed its peace where he could sit quietly and hear birds sing.

     Hogwallows, also called mima mounds, are land forms of mounds and swales; some of the mounds are three or four feet high. Vernal pools appear in the low areas between the mounds in wet seasons, producing uncommon vegetation and providing habitat for wildlife. Mariposa lilies and brodiaea bloom during the spring; in the summer months the hogwallows are mostly covered with dried grasses.

     When we were children, my brother, sister, and I loved playing there, running up and down the mounds and discovering treasures like four-leaf clovers, frogs, and tiny, delicate plants. In really wet years when the vernal pools were very full, our hired man built a Tom Sawyer-type raft that we navigated across the pools by pushing with a long stick.

     As nearby property owners leveled their parcels of native land to plant grapes and citrus, my father grew even more appreciative of the hogwallows. They once had covered thousands of acres in Tulare County, and soil scientists estimated them to be as much as 150,000 years old. He knew the mounds and swales were disappearing and he wanted to preserve an example of them for future generations. To him, the land was more valuable in its natural state than a cash crop or the profit from a sale.

     And so, on a beautiful day in April, 1979, the Hogwallows were formally dedicated to the Tulare County Historical Society to be preserved in perpetuity, through the generosity of Dr. Phil Buckman and his daughter, Carol Buckman.

     I am very appreciative that my father and sister had the foresight to donate the ten acres of hogwallows to the Historical Society. Soil scientists continue to visit the preserve to study and evaluate the phenomenon of this ancient and remarkable landform. I hope that you, too, will visit the Hogwallow Preserve and enjoy seeing this piece of Tulare County as it once was.

June, 2013

UPDATE:  In December of 2022, Greg Collins purchased the Hogwallows Preserve from the Tulare County Historical Society.  A life-long resident, with a strong affinity for the land, Greg spent his career in city planning and promoting sustainable land management policies and practices.  Upon retiring, he fulfilled his dream of buying and protecting some natural Valley land, and greatly enjoyed many days spent exploring and studying the Hogwallows’ ten acres.  In December, 2024, Greg donated the preserve to Sequoia Riverlands Trust, as he had always intended, for its permanent preservation.  SRT is working on a management plan for this special habitat and is currently allowing the public to view the preserve only from the perimeter and the viewing point outside the perimeter fence.  The preserve itself is not open to the public.

                                                    Note: For additional information, see the Origins of the Hogwallows.

                                                      Read more about vernal pools at Mysterious Life of Vernal Pools.

     For more than a century, the people of Tulare County have had a special relationship with the Giant Forest, the giant sequoia grove that is the most-visited single feature in Sequoia National Park. Over the years, local residents have involved themselves in the grove in many different ways, and this involvement has made a real difference. The story reminds us that just because a place is “saved,” our responsibility for it is far from done.

     The giant sequoia trees of the Sierra Nevada grow only in very limited geographical areas called groves. The entire Sierra Nevada contains only about seventy-five such places, which vary in size from less than an acre to several square miles. Tulare County provides a home for over three-quarters of these groves, and most are to be found within either Sequoia National Forest or Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

     Only a handful of groves are larger than the Giant Forest, which covers about three square miles and contains about 2,000 sequoias larger than ten feet in diameter. Of the ten largest sequoias, five are found in this single grove, including the General Sherman Tree, the largest of them all. No other grove even comes close.

     As detailed in our Sequoia National Park story, the addition of the Giant Forest to Sequoia National Park came as a surprise to those who had campaigned in the summer of 1890 to convince Congress to create that park. George Stewart of the Visalia Delta newspaper, who led the campaign that year, knew how special the grove was but believed that the government had already made a commitment to sell the forest to the Kaweah Colony.

     A week after the original Sequoia National Park bill was signed by President Benjamin Harrison on September 25th, a second bill arrived on his desk. Among other things, this second bill, signed by the president on October 1st, added the Giant Forest to the new national park. At the time, no one stepped forward to take credit for the second wave of legislation, but modern historians give credit to attorney and railroad land agent Daniel K. Zumwalt of Tulare. In the fall of 1890, when Congress was considering these questions, Zumwalt was visiting in Washington, D.C. After his death in 1905, Zumwalt’s family felt comfortable giving him public credit for the creation of General Grant National Park, which was another part of that same bill. Without Zumwalt’s likely involvement, it is quite possible that the Giant Forest would ultimately have been sold and logged.

     A century later, it’s easy to assume that everyone immediately understood the significance of Sequoia National Park, but for the first decade of its existence, Congress allocated no money whatsoever to make the park accessible to visitors. Frustrated by this obvious omission, the residents of Tulare County sought to correct the situation. In the summer of 1899, the Visalia Board of Trade (we now call similar organizations “chambers of commerce”) organized a political pack trip into the park to show off both its potential and its needs. Playing a key role was Ben Maddox, publisher of the Visalia newspaper known as the Tulare County Times (an ancestor of the modern Visalia Times-Delta). Out of this came an annual appropriation to build roads and trails within the park.

     In 1903, using this money, the park completed a wagon road into the Giant Forest. Almost immediately, Tulare County residents started visiting the cool, green grove, especially during the hottest part of the year. Farmers and businessmen alike would take their wives and children up to the forest to camp for a month or two while they stayed in the valley to earn a living. By the 1910s, the Giant Forest sheltered a sizeable contingent of local residents each summer. To this day, old-time local families still remember stories of the many happy months they spent beating the heat in the shade of the towering sequoias.

     After 1926, additional connections linked Visalia and the Giant Forest. That summer a new road opened, the Generals Highway. Suddenly, it was easy to drive an automobile up to the grove. The trip took less than three hours in a car versus the two to three days the same journey had taken in a wagon via the original road.

     Visitation soared, and a park concessioner known as the Sequoia and General Grant National Parks Company built hundreds of cabins and tents in the heart of the grove. The company would make its headquarters in Visalia for the next forty years. In these same years, Visalia adopted the descriptive slogan “Gateway to the Sequoias,” a title it maintains to this day in its municipal marketing efforts.

     In the 1970s, the size and scope of the human development within the grove became an issue. Simply put, many worried that the human footprint within the Giant Forest had become too large. In response, the National Park Service developed a proposal to remove all commercial development from the grove and relocate it a few miles away in new buildings outside the giant sequoia area.

     In August 1974, the Park Service took this proposal to the residents of Tulare County in the form of a public meeting in Visalia. At that meeting, the Park Service heard both that relocating the lodges made sense and that preserving park campgrounds was of the highest importance. This proved a key turning point in the development of the final plan. In the years to follow, all commercial development did leave the Giant Forest, to be replaced by the modern Wuksachi Lodge some six miles away. And as many Visalians had advocated, the nearby campground at Lodgepole was retained and remodeled.

     Today, the long-established relationship between Visalia and the Giant Forest continues to find new expressions. Since 2007, the city has operated a summer shuttle service between the transit center in Visalia and the Giant Forest Museum. Each summer day, buses connect these two destinations and provide an easy way for local residents to continue to do what they have done for so long – enjoy the Big Trees.

     The many residents of Tulare County continue to take a very strong interest in the Giant Forest. Since the late nineteenth century, this special place has kept its hold on the hearts of its lowland neighbors. Visitors from all over the world would agree the Giant Forest, in many ways, is Tulare County’s ultimate sequoia grove.

July, 2015

SEE related articles:  Moro Rock Stairway, Tharp’s Log, Sequoia National Park

     Big Trees, the magnificent giant sequoias growing between 5,000 and 7,000 feet in our skyscraping Sierra Nevada, have made Tulare County world famous, and justifiably so. But our county is home to some other big trees that are also well worth visiting, beautiful in all seasons, and very easy to get to, with no mountain driving required. Head north from Lemon Cove for just a few miles on a scenic rural road and discover Homer Ranch Preserve, where majestic valley oaks and splendid sycamores enhance a picturesque foothill environment conserved and managed by Sequoia Riverlands Trust.

     Spreading across 1,819 acres along Dry Creek Valley, the preserve protects one of California’s rarest habitats, a sycamore alluvial woodland, and provides critical habitat for native species such as the bald eagle, acorn woodpecker, and western pond turtle. The preserve combines historic land preservation with modern habitat-sensitive cattle ranching on its extensive grasslands and blue oak woodlands. In springtime, in most years, a spectacular display of wildflowers splashes the green hillsides with brilliant fields of yellow, orange, and purple.

     Running through the valley is Dry Creek, a seasonal stream which drains approximately 25 square miles of watershed extending from the western edge of Kings Canyon National Park to its junction with the Kaweah River. The stream is shallow and dries up in the hot months, because it is not fed by any snowpack, but in wet winters it can produce startling, rejuvenating floods.

     For many centuries, the Wukchumni Yokuts lived on and managed these lands. They used fire to stimulate the growth of useable plants. The men hunted small game such as squirrels and rabbits, and the women collected bulbs, seeds, and blue oak acorns. You can still see some of their mortar holes for grinding the acorns in two granite boulders just south of the preserve entrance. Remnants of campsites and villages in the valley give evidence of a stable, enduring population.

     In 1882, the great-great-grandparents of Richard Homer settled and began ranching here. For 120 years, generations of the family raised cattle along Dry Creek. Then, in 2002, Richard and his wife, Stephanie, inspired by a visit to the Kaweah Oaks Preserve, approached Sequoia Riverlands Trust (SRT) about selling the ranch. They were moving out of state and wanted to ensure that their land would continue the Homer heritage as a working cattle ranch, but also that it would allow people to visit and enjoy its beauty.

     SRT was immediately interested in the Homers’ offer to sell the ranch because the creek area along its western edge hosts such a significant sycamore alluvial woodland. Only 17 areas in the state still support this habitat, and Dry Creek is the second largest of these. The large size of the property prompted SRT to partner with The Nature Conservancy to raise funding for the $1.5 million purchase price. Generous support from the River Parkways program of the California Resources Agency and from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation met the goal.

     In June, 2004, SRT, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, announced the enduring protection of the Homer Ranch lands. Cattle grazing would continue under a conservation plan as an integral part of managing the preserve, to ensure that invasive, non-native grasses would not out-compete and overwhelm the native species.

     After acquiring the land, SRT’s initial challenge was to upgrade the fencing and to develop several water sources for the cattle to keep them away from the overgrazed creek area, where they were even eating the sycamores. By 2012, the fence work was completed, and three springs and ponds in the hills to the east had been rehabilitated, allowing the cattle to be moved away from the creek in summer.

     Before cattle came to the San Joaquin Valley, elk would intensively graze an area and then move on, often not returning for several years. The elks’ hooves broke up the ground, allowing seeds, including the sycamores’, to become established. To learn what grazing patterns will be most effective today, SRT is partnering with Point Blue Conservation Science and the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to establish sustainable grazing practices that are compatible with preserving the native species present.

     After completing baseline inventories of native and non-native species distributions, the land trust and Point Blue, working with the preserve’s grazier, will experiment with modern rotational grazing patterns. The results will be shared with interested ranchers, so that they can evaluate options for their own land.

     SRT completed another important project in 2012, the construction of a parking lot and a network of trails on the ranch, open on weekends all year except in summer and early fall, when fire danger is too high.

     Late November is one of the nicest times of the year to enjoy the Homer Ranch trails. Fall storms and cooler weather then are turning the grasses green and coloring the big, leathery, five-lobed sycamore leaves yellow and red-orange, striking against the trees’ sinuous white trunks and limbs mottled with exfoliating bark. Dry Creek swells and sometimes floods, bringing new alluvial soil and sycamore seeds to higher ground, and recharging the aquifer.

     At the western edge of the floodplain, live oak trees shade granite boulders. To the east, an extensive blue oak woodland climbs the foothills, densest in the rocky canyons and on the north-facing slopes, while the south-facing slopes and flatter areas are covered with native perennial bunch grasses and annual non-native grasses.

     Watch for birds and small animals, black Angus cattle, and high-soaring hawks. Savor the solitude and the aromas of autumn as you walk where Wukchumni people once flourished.

     Be sure to come again in spring, when California poppies, lupine, fiddleneck, popcorn, clarkia, madia, and other wildflowers spread sensational patches of color across the grasslands and up the hillsides. At pastoral, historic Homer Ranch, you can still experience an exceptional Tulare County landscape that is little changed from when the first European settlers arrived.

     (History Note: When Richard Homer’s great-great-grandparents and other European-American settlers such as the Pogue family arrived in their covered wagons and established homesteads there, Dry Creek and Dry Creek Valley were known as Limekiln Creek and Limekiln Valley, as they were named in Thompson’s Atlas of 1892.)

November, 2015

     For countless centuries, Native Americans in what is now Tulare County traveled into and across the vast, rugged southern Sierra Nevada to avail themselves of its abundant resources. Following the courses and canyons of its streams and rivers, the blue and green chains of its little lakes and lush meadows, and the purposeful paths of its wildlife, they hunted and fished, gathered useful plants and seeds, escaped the San Joaquin Valley’s scorching summer heat, and visited and traded with the people who lived in the huge Owens Valley on the other side of the range.

     In the 1800s, new groups of people from far away began coming into these mountains to exploit their resources on a much greater scale. Prospectors, miners, hunters, trappers, cattlemen, sheepmen, loggers, and mule packers transformed the ancient trails and the landscapes they traveled through.

     In the 1860s, two men, John Jordan and then John Benjamin Hockett, contracted to build trans-Sierra pack trails under the authority of the Tulare County Board of Supervisors. The Jordan Toll Trail, constructed in 1861-62, extended almost 100 miles from Yokohl Valley to near Olancha at the southern end of Owens Lake. Hockett’s Toll Trail was authorized in December, 1862, and built in 1863-64 to connect Visalia to Lone Pine. It traveled up the South Fork of the Kaweah, crossed the Hockett Plateau, incorporated parts of the Jordan Trail, and finally descended near Cottonwood Pass to the Owens Valley. For the next forty years, it served as the principal trail route across the Southern Sierra.

     Harry O’Farrell, a meat-hunter for the Hockett Trail crew, discovered the Mineral King valley in 1864 while searching for game to feed the workers. Union Army troops traveled the trail from Camp Babbitt in Visalia to help protect the Coso silver mines and Camp Independence in the Owens Valley. Ranchers drove their livestock up the trail to feed on mountain meadows in the summer.

     In the 1870s, these trails and the new Mineral King road, built in 1873, were being used by increasing numbers of recreationists — campers, mountaineers, adventurers, fishermen, hunters, and nature enthusiasts. Most traveled with pack trains. Tremendous overgrazing, especially by herds of thousands of sheep, caused extensive erosion, depleted or eliminated plants and forage, and severely damaged the trails. Those who thought of the future believed that uses of the mountains and their resources would have to be regulated and even halted in some areas if their destruction were to be avoided.

     In 1890, Sequoia National Park was established (initially, only one-third its current size). Its mission was to protect the land and resources within its boundaries to provide “a public park, or pleasure ground, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Clearly, the unregulated, unfettered exploitation had to be stopped inside the park. This became a chief duty of the U.S. cavalry troops assigned to administer Sequoia starting in 1891.

     Patrolling the big, rugged park meant good trails were needed. The Hockett Trail was ready-made for use by the troops guarding the park’s southern boundary. To facilitate the soldiers’ work, four civilian rangers had been hired and a series of cabins began to be envisioned along the patrol routes. By the summer of 1906, two had been constructed on the trail to Giant Forest and one was underway at Hockett Meadow, about 3-1/2 miles north of the Hockett Trail at an elevation of 8500 feet.

     This prime location was directly south of Atwell Mill and Silver City, where the Army troops were headquartered for the summer. It provided good water from Whitman Creek, good fishing, plenty of deer in the broad, lush meadow, and fine forage for pack and riding stock. The original sturdy cabin, with its shake walls and roof, glazed windows, and large rock outside the front door, served the park’s rangers until 1934, when Civilian Conservation Corps workers built a new ranger station to the east of it. The 1906 building continued to provide accommodations for work crews until it was badly damaged by the heavy winter of 1968-69, and then razed by the Park Service.

     In 1934, along with the new ranger station, the CCC constructed an adjacent barn and, in the forest near Hockett Meadow, a trail camp for tourists and a short-term (“stub”) camp for work crews. The 1934 ranger station continues in use today, serving backcountry rangers, trail crews, snow surveyors, and weather station and meadow monitors. Its companion barn provides storage space and houses tack and feed for ranger and crew livestock.

     The Hockett cabin measures 23 x 33 feet, with two bedrooms and a kitchen-living room. The wood-burning cooking range also heats the interior and vents through the stone chimney in the center of the roof. The log walls rest on a concrete foundation veneered with native stone. An inviting stone-floored porch, 12.5 feet long and 7 feet wide, frames the entry door. The gable roof was originally made of shakes. Later it was covered with aluminum, but the metal has since been replaced with shakes, returning it to its original appearance.

     The barn stands just northeast of the cabin. It, too, is built of logs supported on a stone foundation and capped with a shake roof. It measures 17 x 26 feet outside and 13 x 17 feet inside (the battered pattern of the log corner joints adds to the exterior dimensions).

     Both structures are excellent examples of National Park Service rustic architecture, also called “Parkitecture.” The natural, native materials of their exteriors — the lodgepole pine logs, hand-cut shakes, and granite rock facings on the concrete foundations — enable them to harmonize with their surrounding landscape. Their design and workmanship are compatible with the work of early pioneers in the Sierra Nevada. Recognized for their significance in both architecture and landscape architecture, the two buildings were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. They are also culturally significant, because they were constructed by workers in the CCC, the most concerted social program ever to occur in the area.

     Today’s visitors can still hike or ride on the old Hockett Trail to admire these iconic buildings. Carefully maintained and restored over the years by Park craftsmen, the cabin and barn continue to look just as they did when skilled CCC workers built them in 1934. Deer still graze together with pack and saddle stock on verdant Hockett Meadow. And the Park’s backcountry rangers continue to protect the park and its visitors, just as they have for over 100 years, by patrolling from Hockett Meadow’s ranger station

May, 2020

     Every big story starts somewhere, and it is up in the Sierra at General Grant Grove that we find the first example of Tulare County citizens taking action to protect natural resources they care about. The saga of how the Grant Grove came to be protected for public use more than 140 years ago is chapter one in a story that is still progressing today.

     By the 1860s, cattlemen, miners, and mountaineers had explored enough of the Sierra Nevada to know that the southern third of the range – located largely in Tulare County – contained numerous stands of giant sequoia trees. Of all these groves, perhaps the easiest to access were the stands located on the divide between the Kaweah and Kings rivers. Wagon roads were pushed into these woods in the middle 1860s, when logging first began in the region, and those primitive routes soon also provided access for summer visitors seeking to escape the extreme summer heat of the San Joaquin Valley.

     Tulare County residents so enjoyed camping in the cool green forests around the General Grant Tree that they began to develop protective feelings about their summer camping grounds. In 1870, when Mariposa County resident William Snediker came to the area looking for a large sequoia to cut down and remove for display purposes, local residents reacted negatively. Editor R. H. Shearer of the Tulare Weekly Times (an ancestor of the modern Visalia Times-Delta) came out against the project and talked Edward Willett, registrar of the federal General Land Office branch in Visalia, into taking action to stop Snediker.

     The Mariposa County man had already selected a tree and begun preparing it for felling. When ordered to stop, Snediker walked away from the tree, which had already been damaged sufficiently to cause it ultimately to die. The towering remains of the dead tree still stand today, more than 140 years after it was first attacked. The snag is known as the Dead Giant.

     Though Snedicker had been stopped, threats to the grove continued to multiply. In 1872, brothers Thomas and Israel Gamlin built a log cabin near the General Grant Tree and filed papers to purchase the surrounding land. Government officials apparently talked them out of the claim on the grounds that the area should be preserved for public use. (The Gamlin Cabin still stands today.)

     Worried that they would lose their summer camping grounds, Visalians began to organize to give the area better protection. Several newspaper editorials about the value of the sequoias appeared, and in January 1880, the General Land Office withdrew from sale four square miles of land in and around the General Grant Tree. A resulting field inspection disclosed that the best Big Trees were not quite where they had been thought to be, however, and on June 1st 1880, the withdrawal was shifted to better protect the trees. The boundary separating Tulare and Fresno counties now split the reserved tract in half.

     The withdrawal from sale of these 2,560 acres marked the first formal step in the preservation of what would ultimately become modern Kings Canyon National Park. For the next ten years, the four square miles around the General Grant Grove remained in government hands while nearly all the surrounding lands were sold to private parties. Ultimately, most of the land that was sold would be logged.

     In 1881, California Senator John Miller proposed a bill that would have laid a large national park over the southern Sierra, including the Grant Grove area, but the bill had little support and died. It was not until 1890 that the withdrawn lands around the General Grant Tree received permanent protection. In the summer of that year, Visalians George Stewart, R. E. Hyde, Frank Walker, Tipton Lindsay, and Daniel K. Zumwalt began agitating for the creation of a national park in the Kaweah River watershed to protect giant sequoias. Santa Barbara congressman William Vandever (who also represented Tulare County) submitted a bill to do just that. Vandever’s Sequoia National Park bill passed and became law on September 25, 1890.

     One week later, a second bill made it through the Congress. This one had as its primary purpose the creation of Yosemite National Park, but it also contained a provision to give permanent national park status to the four square miles surrounding the General Grant Tree. On October 1, 1890, this relatively small area became General Grant National Park, the nation’s fourth such reservation.

     General Grant National Park endured under that title for the next half century before it was merged in 1940 with the new and much larger Kings Canyon National Park. Since that time, the area has been known formally as the General Grant Grove Section of Kings Canyon National Park.

     Today, this island of virgin forest, together with its visitor center, campgrounds, and lodge, is one of the most-visited destinations in the southern Sierra Nevada. Numerous local residents still enjoy visiting this magnificent green forest that Tulare County residents worked so long ago to protect from destruction.

June, 2014

     From the scientific perspective:

     Hogwallows. Mima Mounds. Pimpled Plains. All are names of similarly described land formations existing in great numbers in many locations in North America, South America, and Africa. In the United States the principal locations of these mounds are from Missouri to southern Texas, the plateau regions of Colorado, the northwestern states, and the Great Central Valley and southern coastal regions of California. In 1966, some 665 acres of mima mounds near Little Rock, Washington, were protected under the National Natural Landmark program of the National Park Service.

     Soil scientists around the world have spent untold hours studying these mounds and swales, resulting in more than 30 theories being posited to explain what caused their formation. These range from earthquake or glacial action, to ancient fish nests, to flooding due to giant tsunamis raised by asteroid impacts at sea. Nevertheless, their origin remains an unsolved mystery.

     One of the dominant theories of their formation is that the mounds are the work of pocket gophers, as cited in an article in “Soil Science Society Proceedings 1954,” by Rodney Arkley and Herrick Brown of the Soils Department of the University of California, Berkeley. After extensive study of hogwallows in the Merced area, they concluded that “the pocket gopher is responsible for the mounds, but he builds them only on soils where the thickness of soil is suitable for burrowing and root growth is restricted.” Thus, generation after generation of gophers, from the prehistoric to the present day, may keep building nests near the crest of any high spot in the land surface, forming the characteristic hogwallow mounds above the hardpan swales.*

     * See also: https://www.science.org/content/article/mima-mound-mystery-solved

     From the Native American Perspective:

     As part of the Creation Story related to historian Frank Latta by a Wukchumni (Yokut), this is how the hogwallows were formed: In the very old days, after the Eagle made the world, there was only Tulare Lake and the plains. Eagle called the People and told them to build a new place for him. The People got together to build high mountains for Eagle. They used their carrying baskets to take the dirt from the San Joaquin Valley and pile it up to make the mountains. When Eagle saw that the mountains were high enough to have snow on their tops, he called to the People to stop. The People took their baskets off their backs and emptied the remaining dirt onto the ground, making the little round mounds that White People call Hogwallows. The Wukchumni word for hogwallows is Pawkawkwitch.

June, 2013

     Perhaps the most remote and least known of all the major geographical features of Tulare County is to be found in the county’s southeastern quadrant. Here, near the southern end of the Sierra Nevada, the range takes on a distinctive character found nowhere else. Instead of raising high peaks against the sky, this part of the Sierra takes the form of an extensive uplifted plateau. Those who know the Sierra call this region the Kern Plateau. No other part of the Sierra Nevada looks anything like it.

     A combination of altitude and aridity makes this part of the Sierra unique. Much of the undulating surface of the plateau lies between 7,000 and 9,000 feet. Usually, altitudes of this height would guarantee generous winter snowfall, but the Kern Plateau finds itself within the rain shadow of the Great Western Divide, the north-south ridge that forms the headwaters of the Kaweah and Tule rivers. To the east of the divide, exhausted winter storms deposit only a fraction of the water they dump on the mountains immediately to the west. No other part of the High Sierra is so dry.

     Those who have visited the Kern Plateau know how all this comes together. Open sandy meadows, covered with sparse grass and sagebrush, run for miles. Around them, rolling hills support open stands of Jeffrey, lodgepole, and foxtail pines. Small streams flow across the sandy landscape, and it is here that the golden trout – California’s state fish – evolved. The bright colors of the golden trout mimic the shining flakes of mica and quartz in the stream bottoms.

     Getting to the Kern Plateau country has always been difficult. Travelers coming from the San Joaquin Valley must surmount the Great Western Divide, then cross the rugged and deep canyon of the main stem of the Kern River before they can climb onto the plateau. To the east, a row of peaks — including 12,700-foot Olancha Peak, and a mile-high escarpment separate the plateau from the northwestern edge of the Mojave Desert near Ridgecrest.

     The history of the plateau reflects its remoteness. Like all the surrounding mountain country, the Kern Plateau was first set aside as public land when the Sierra Forest Reserve came into being in 1893. In 1908, when the reserve lands were re-designated as national forests, the Forest Service divided the plateau between the Sequoia and Inyo national forests, a condition that continues today.

     For the first half of the twentieth century, the Forest Service essentially left the plateau alone. Cattle ranchers’ herds grazed the meadows each summer, and hunters and fishermen packed in to enjoy the solitude. Most of these visitors arrived on horseback. Over time, the secluded country earned a small cadre of dedicated fans, people who enjoyed the quiet and beauty of this often-stark high country retreat.

     Foremost among these were Ardis Walker and his wife, Gayle Mendelssohn Walker, who grew up in Tulare County. By the early 1950s, Ardis and Gayle lived in Kernville, the southern entrance to the Kern Plateau region. There, they owned and operated the Kernville Inn. The two pursued many interests. They worked hard to establish CSU Bakersfield, and Ardis wrote poetry. The High Sierra, however, always stayed near the top of their personal lists. Year after year, they traveled into the mountains and especially into the Kern Plateau country.

     As early as the 1930s, Walker had begun to worry that the beauty of this wilderness retreat might eventually be compromised by road building and logging. In 1947, he persuaded a high-ranking Forest Service official, Regional Forester Pat Thompson, to accompany him on a prolonged trip through the heart of the Kern Plateau. Thompson was so impressed that he issued an order reserving the country for wilderness recreation.

     A decade later, however, at the height of the economic boom of the 1950s, the Forest Service reversed itself and announced that it would allow the plateau to be logged. By the early 1960s, roads were being pushed into the plateau from both east and west, and truckloads of logs were spilling out of the region.

     Ardis Walker was appalled. Now in his 60s, he recruited a new generation of activists to help him protect the landscapes he so appreciated. Schoolteacher Bob Barnes of Porterville played an important role, as did Joe Fontaine, who lived in Tehachapi. The campaign to preserve at least a portion of the plateau as wilderness went on for a full twenty years, until finally, in 1978, Congress gave protection to the northern portion of the Kern Plateau, designating more than 300,000 acres as the Golden Trout Wilderness, about 80% of it in Tulare County.

     The wilderness also included much of the rugged eastern slope of the Great Western Divide, as well as a major portion of the canyon of the Kern River. Ardis Walker celebrated the wilderness he had worked so hard to create and lived another dozen years before he passed away in 1991 at the age of 90.

     Today, the Golden Trout Wilderness protects the High Sierra country immediately to the south of Sequoia National Park. Within this Forest Service-administered wilderness, life goes on much as it has for more than a century. Cattle graze the meadows during the summer months, hikers, hunters, and fishermen come to enjoy the solitude, and the beauty of the land remains for all to enjoy.

December, 2014

     Without doubt, one of the most contested and argued-about pieces of Tulare County in recent times has been the portion of the Sequoia National Forest that since 2000 has been conserved as the Giant Sequoia National Monument. The story of how these more than 300,000 acres came to be a national monument provides an almost textbook example of how land management issues are defined, debated, and eventually resolved in our society. The process can be messy, to say the least.

     To understand the origins of Tulare County’s only national monument, one must know something about the Sequoia National Forest. As documented elsewhere in this website, Tulare County residents fought hard in the early 1890s to withdraw the forest lands of the Sierra Nevada from sale by the federal government and to have them instead set aside permanently as public land. This was done to protect the mountain watersheds that local farmers thought were essential to their agricultural futures. Originally a part of the immense Sierra Forest Reserve, the area was defined and named the Sequoia National Forest in 1908.

     The federal agency known as the USDA-Forest Service has now managed the Sequoia National Forest for more than a century. From the beginning, national forest policy has always called for sustainable utilization of the land, with possible uses including not only watershed protection but also timber production, wildlife management, grazing, mining, recreation, and wilderness. For the first half of the twentieth century, management of the national forest system generally proceeded in a very conservative manner, with relatively little development or logging taking place. After the Second World War, however, national expectations about national forests evolved, and management of forest lands across the nation became more active. Logging, in particular, became much more heavily emphasized on most forests.

     The Sequoia National Forest did not escape this trend. In the 1960s and 1970s, the forest became a major timber producer, a role that was confirmed in 1988 when the Forest Service issued a new management plan for the forest that established an annual timber production target of 97 million board feet. (This number equals approximately 18,300 miles of 1” by 12” boards.) At that time, the Forest Service was already achieving annual sales totals of over 70 million board feet.

     The annual production of so large a volume of lumber required that the Forest Service analyze all the forest’s acreage to determine where it could produce timber. This analysis led the forest’s managers into a consideration of the future of the forest’s thirty-three groves of giant sequoia trees. Until the 1970s, federal managers had left these groves essentially alone, allowing them to exist as de facto preservation enclaves within the larger forest. (Some of the groves had been logged much earlier by private parties prior to their being included within the national forest.)

     Meanwhile, scientific research taking place outside the national forests had reached a surprising conclusion: giant sequoia reproduction required forest disturbance. Put another way, this meant that giant sequoia trees, which grow only from tiny seeds, survived best when their seeds sprouted in bare mineral soil in open sunny places. In times past, the primary disturber of the conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada had been fire, and scientists concluded that fire had played an essential role in allowing young sequoias to sprout naturally and prosper. But logging is another form of forest disturbance, and the Forest Service knew that young sequoias also sprang up after older trees were cut. Out of this fact grew an idea — one that would both allow young sequoias to germinate and help meet the forest’s timber production goals — why not log in the Sequoia National Forest’s thirty-three sequoia groves?

     In 1981, the Forest Service began logging in the groves, and the program lasted for five seasons before it was suspended. During those years, the Forest Service conducted thirteen timber sales covering about 1,000 acres within the groves. The intensity of logging varied from site to site, but in several areas the Forest Service authorized the removal of all standing trees except a handful of large, specimen-sized sequoias.

     Logging within the sequoia groves produced sharply divided public opinion. Some appreciated the economic activity that resulted from the program. (During these years up to 240 persons worked at a sawmill in Terra Bella that received the logs cut on the Sequoia National Forest.) Others were deeply disturbed by the destruction taking place within the groves, places some saw as having near-sacred status. The controversy soon went political, and by 1986 the critics had applied enough pressure to cause the Forest Service to suspend the program.

     When the Forest Service issued a new management plan for the Sequoia National Forest in 1988, however, that document called for yet higher levels of timber harvests. As a result, the battle over the forest’s giant sequoia groves intensified. Numerous organizations filed appeals of the 1988 forest plan and, under considerable pressure, the Forest Service agreed to negotiate a mediated settlement to the dispute. The resulting agreement (signed in 1990) ended logging within the groves but did not significantly reduce timber harvest on the surrounding lands.

     By now, the fight had gone national. The Tulare County Audubon Society actually went so far as to place a full-page ad in the New York Times challenging the management directions chosen by the Forest Service. The next several years saw congressional hearings on the subject (1991), a Forest Service public symposium on giant sequoia management (1992), and a visit to the region by President George H. W. Bush (also 1992), who signed a presidential proclamation guaranteeing that sequoias would not be cut.

     The fight continued, however, with local activists like Carla Cloer, Charlene Little, and Ara Marderosian working with national environmental groups. Increasingly, the goal was to end logging both within the groves and over the larger region that surrounded them. Inevitably, a political fight of this scale reached the highest levels of government. Resolution came in the late 1990s when President Bill Clinton concluded that the preferred outcome would be one that strictly limited logging on the Sequoia National Forest.

     On April 15, 2000, Clinton visited the Sequoia National Forest and signed a proclamation that designated some 327,000 acres (27%) of the Sequoia National Forest as a national monument. Making its purpose very clear, the proclamation specified that the lands in question would no longer be subject to commercial logging and that trees could be cut within the monument only for reasons of safety or ecological management.

     Like the Mineral King controversy of the 1960s and 1970s, the creation of the Giant Sequoia National Monument deeply split the people of Tulare County. The county’s board of supervisors even filed suit to overturn the monument, a case that ultimately failed. Others, who valued the groves for their inspirational beauty, celebrated the new direction as long overdue.

     Many years after the creation of the monument, some local residents still argue about whether it represents the right direction for the management of more than a quarter of the Sequoia National Forest. What emerges from this debate with great clarity, however, no matter which side of the argument one supports, is the great power that the giant sequoia trees and the forests in which they grow exercise over us all.

     Truly, we care about these trees and their future.

March, 2014

     Two beautiful bridges anchor the Generals Highway Stone Bridges Historic District in Sequoia National Park. Standing about a mile apart, the Marble Fork (Lodgepole) and the Clover Creek bridges are fine examples of the National Parks’ famous “rustic architecture” (or “Parkitecture”), which aims always “In the construction of roads, trails, buildings, and other improvements . . . to the harmonizing of these improvements with the landscape.” In their functionality, character, and quality, these bridges fulfill the Park Service’s dual mission of providing access for the enjoyment and protection of the park’s resources while leaving the park’s scenery unimpaired.

     Constructed in 1930-31 as part of a 15-year project to link Sequoia and General Grant (now Kings Canyon) national parks by road, the bridges cross the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River and nearby Clover Creek. They were designed to fit “naturally” into their scenic landscapes, to endure, and to be easy to maintain.

     Both are sturdy concrete and stone arch bridges. Although produced during the major economic and social crisis of the Great Depression’s early years, they are models of timeless design and the work of highly skilled craftsmen, made to last. The first step in their construction was to build a concrete barrel vault one or two feet thick to span each waterway. Next, walls were added on both sides of the barrel vault and along its top.

     Then the concrete walls were covered (“faced”) with native stone. Instead of being cut to regular geometric shapes and laid in careful, even rows, the walls’ masonry was “uncoursed” so that the stones have a natural, “rustic,” unworked appearance and look almost as if they have just been stacked upon each other by some natural process. The uncoursed masonry overlays the modern construction methods and materials (e.g., rebar and concrete), creating the appearance of true stone arches.

     Finally, the space between the walls and over the top of the concrete vault was filled with earth, graded, and then paved to create the 25-foot wide roadway over the bridge.

     The bridges’ “natural” appearance and careful integration into their respective environments are the result of the visionary work of the Park Service’s structural and landscape architects, and the careful craftsmen who were contracted to build them. Each construction plan followed strict guidelines to preserve the natural landscape, and the plans were carefully checked on location to ensure that they would “fit the ground.”

     Extraordinary measures were taken to minimize damage to the park’s scenery. Blasting had to be limited (even though this was a hardship in the often sloped and rocky mountain terrain), and trees and other vegetation were left standing whenever possible. Debris was disposed of as inconspicuously as conditions allowed. Sites where rock was quarried and fill dirt excavated were located out of sight of the roadway in areas that would not be permanently scarred by the removals.

     The construction camps were set up in places that could tolerate hard use and be successfully restored. After construction was finished, damaged slopes were smoothed and rounded and then replanted with native species matching those in the area (often provided by the park’s plant nursery).

     To properly admire these long-lived historic structures in their very different, well-restored landscapes, you must get out of your car. Traveling north through Sequoia National Park, you’ll come first to the Marble Fork Bridge, which carries the Generals Highway over a lively, boulder-strewn branch of the Kaweah River. Just beyond the road turning into the Lodgepole area, you’ll cross the bridge and then immediately turn left into the Lodgepole Picnic Area. Importantly, this fine spot for lunch or a snack also offers easy access to the river and an excellent view of the bridge from the bank, or, when conditions permit, from in the stream itself.

     The Marble Fork Bridge spans a distance of 45 feet and is beautifully proportioned to its intimate forested setting. Outstanding masonry work melds the bridge with its landscape. The native stone was selected to match the surrounding rocks, and precisely cut to the architect’s specifications to create a natural look.

     Drive about another mile ahead and you’ll come to the waterway crossed by the 90-foot span of the Clover Creek Bridge. Here the terrain is wide open, with the stream slicing through sheets and slabs of bare granite. Walk over the bridge to enjoy the big views and marvel at how well this timeless, rugged structure suits its environment.

     A small third “bridge,” spanning Silliman Creek just beyond the Marble Fork bridge, is included in the Generals Highway Stone Bridges Historic District. Technically, this structure, which spans a distance of only 16 feet, is a culvert, not a bridge (which by engineering definition is over six meters in length). Nevertheless, even this minor construction, a reinforced concrete slab, features rubble masonry abutments and facing to harmonize it with the very rocky creek bed it traverses, and so provides another noteworthy example of Parkitecture.

     By the summer of 1935, the great vision of linking the two national parks and their iconic sequoias — General Sherman and General Grant — via a superbly scenic, easy to drive road had been realized, and on June 23, the newly-completed Generals Highway was dedicated to the public. Cars — 669 of them — drove in, from both the Sequoia and the General Grant park entrances, bringing 2,488 people to celebrate the great accomplishment. They met for the ribbon-cutting at the highway’s halfway point: the panoramic Clover Creek Bridge.

     NOTE: See our related articles on enduring “Parkitecture” Treasures: Ash Mountain Entrance Sign, Hockett Meadow Ranger Station, Moro Rock Stairway, and Redwood Meadow Ranger Station.

April, 2021