Читать книгу The John Muir Trail. Through the Californian Sierra Nevada онлайн

25 страница из 67

The combined Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks amount to over 1300 square miles of mountain and forest wilderness. The elevation range is from as low as 1500ft in the low foothills of the west of the parks to the high mountains of the Great Western Divide and High Sierras in the east. The highest point in continental America (or the contiguous states), the 14,496ft-high Mount Whitney, lies on the border of Sequoia National Park.

By far the majority of the park lies within the Sequoia and Kings Canyon Wilderness Area; so, as in Yosemite, few of the 2 million annual visitors to the parks reach the heartland of this stunning area. The parks are famous for their Sequoias, the world’s largest trees. The best examples are to be found in the north of the parks area, in the Giant Forest plateau. Here can be found the tallest of the Sequoias, the 275ft-high ‘General Sherman’, whose trunk has a ground-level circumference of 103ft and which weighs an estimated 1385 tons.

John Muir Wilderness