National Park of Sequoia and Kings Canyon

Location: California
Sequoia: Established September 25, 1890
Kings Canyon: Established March 4, 1940
Size: 865,257 acres (350,157 hectares)

Bigness—big trees and big canyons—inspired the separate founding of each of these parks. In 1943 Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks began to be jointly administered. The two contiguous parks are 66 miles (106 kilometers) long and 36 miles (58 kilometers) at their widest point.

Nearly every square mile of these vast parks is wilderness. A backpacker can hike to a spot that is farther from a road than any other place in the lower 48. But visitors can easily reach Sequoia's famed attraction, the Giant Forest of sequoias.

Relatively few visitors hike any of the parks' 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) of trails. Still, there are enough backpackers to worry officials, who protect the backcountry by regulating their numbers. Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet (4,418 meters) the highest peak in the United States south of Alaska, rises at the eastern border. Backpackers coming in from the east can get to Whitney in one or two days. From the park's western trailheads, they reach it by a 70-mile (113-kilometer), 8-day trek across the park's snowswept, glacier-dotted heights.

Some visitors are startled to learn that some of the smoke they see rises from "prescribed burning"—controlled fires deliberately set by employees to help the sequoias by removing undergrowth. In the past, when the park fought all fires, brush and deadwood built up. (Seeds cannot germinate in duff so need fires to open groundcover.) The brush fueled fires that imperiled the sequoias—which resist flames at their bases but can die if fire attacks their crowns.