STORMY WEATHER

This old growth redwood fell along the park's Redwood Loop Trail (between trail guide posts #8 and #9, just past the mid-point of the loop) during a strong storm on January 19, 2017. 

Though the falling of large redwoods in the grove is rare, the fury of storms in the grove has often been frightening to those who experienced them. When John Hooper served as resort manager from 1876-1881, he and his family soon learned that Big Trees Grove was not a nice place to spend the stormy season. 

The May 4, 1878 Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel noted that during the past winter ...

“Hooper had to leave the Felton Big Tree Grove four times on account of falling trees. During one windstorm he and his family spent a night in the Fremont Tree. He says the trees groaned and lashed one another, falling here and there, their tops, as they swayed about, looking like an angry sea, and the sound of their fall was like unto the explosion of a hundred cannon."

According to the January 1, 1881 Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel, “… Major Hooper spent several of his nights standing, and during the present week, and just above the Big Tree House, a tree, five feet through, was blown to the ground. The howling of the blast, the falling of limbs and the groaning of the forest monsters, tend to disturbing the nerves and making man and woman sigh for anything but ‘some vast wilderness.’”  

 Photograph of the Giant, circa 1910 courtesy of Frank Perry; other photographs from California State Parks