The Pioneer Cabin sequoia, with a tunnel cut through it, comes down in the storm.
Enlightened nature lovers, who know better these days than to wish for walking paths through holes in giant trees, will not be walking through the Pioneer Cabin Tree in Calaveras County anymore.
That’s because it did this weekend what, in 2,000 years, it never did before. It fell down.
The giant sequoia, 32 feet in diameter, was a highlight of Calaveras Big Trees State Park in the Sierra. For years, motorists drove through an arch carved out of its trunk, and in more recent and solicitous times, people walked through it. But Sunday, rain and soggy ground accomplished what no logger ever could.
Jim Allday, a volunteer from the nearby town of Arnold who was working in the park, said the tree in the 6,500-acre preserve’s North Grove went down about 2 p.m. and “shattered” on impact. The area was off-limits to visitors at the time because of the storm, so it was not known if the giant tree made any noise when it fell.
In social media tributes, fans of the tree mourned its fall from grace with such eulogies as, “Too bad it fell down — what an awesome tree,” and “amazing tree” and “very sad.”
It has been a rough half century for walk-through and drive-through trees, which were popular in the early days of national and state parks when publicizing the size of the trees to a disbelieving public was considered part of the parks’ mission.
“Now we believe it’s more important to preserve and protect them” than to carve drive-through holes in them, said state parks spokeswoman Gloria Sandoval.
The Pioneer Cabin Tree, partially hollowed out by fire, first allowed visitors on horseback to pass through in the 1860s, Sandoval said. The hole was broadened with saws in 1881 and, in 1920, the first cars were allowed to drive through.
That practice continued after the area became a state park in 1931, but some years ago cars were banned and only foot traffic through the tree was permitted.
With no more trees being hollowed out, the ranks of such tourist attractions are thinning. The fabled Wawona Tree in Yosemite National Park, a 234foot-high sequoia that was 26 feet in diameter and an estimated 2,100 years old, suffered a similar fate to the Pioneer Cabin Tree in 1969 when it toppled in heavy snow. Motorists had been allowed to drive through that tree, and tens of thousands did.
Several privately owned giant drive-through trees remain standing on the Northern California coast. One of the best known is the Shrine Tree, a 21-foot-diameter coast redwood in Myers Flat (Humboldt County).
Its owner, Jim Allmon, said it’s always hard to lose a giant tree but acknowledged that the toppling of the Pioneer Cabin Tree might just be good for the proprietors of the remaining drive-through trees, it being a supply-and-demand kind of thing.
“We feel terrible about what happened to the Pioneer Cabin Tree,” Allmon said, before hastily adding that his tree is in good shape and not due to fall over for a few centuries, give or take.
Allmon charges $6 to drive through the Shrine Tree, but included in that price is the right to drive onto a nearby fallen tree trunk, to walk through a giant stump and to inspect two cozy tree houses fashioned from hollowed-out trees.
“We don’t try to rip people off,” Allmon said.
The trouble with the drivethrough tree business model is that there is not a lot of repeat business. Once you have driven through a tree, Allmon said, you have done it.
“It’s something so crazy, everybody has to do it once,” Allmon said. “People love to say they drove through a tree.”
Allmon says the hole in his tree was created naturally, by a fire hundreds of years ago, and never artificially enlarged. The burn hole, in fact, may have saved the Shrine Tree from loggers who bypassed it in favor of other trees without
holes in them.
As for other privately operated drive-through trees, there is the 21-foot-diameter Chandelier Tree near Leggett (Mendocino County), whose owners charge $5 to drive through the tree but only $3 to bicycle through it. The Tour Thru Tree near Klamath (Del Norte County) costs $5 to drive through for cars with up to three occupants. Additional passengers in the same car cost $1 extra per person, for some reason.
In Sequoia National Park, visitors may drive through “Tunnel Log,” which is a hole cut into a 275-foot sequoia that fell across a park road in 1937. Admission to the park, which includes the right to drive through the tree, is $30. But the National Park Service is also obliged to advise visitors that the day of drive-through trees — standing or fallen — may be past.
“Times change,” said the park service in a statement about Tunnel Log. “Actions proper for one generation may not fit the needs and goals of a succeeding generation. When our national parks were young, cutting tunnels through sequoia trees was a way to popularize the parks. Today, our goal in the parks is to allow nature to run its course.”