Northern Sentinels

The Placer County Big Trees Grove — California's Northernmost Sequoias

There is a small local park tucked far away off the beaten track in Placer County, California. It is the home of the northernmost stand of sequoias, one that is geographically also farthest away from all other old growth-sequoia. This is the Placer County Big Trees Grove, a beautiful rolling bowl of Lodgepole Pines, Douglas Firs, and a small, perhaps defiant grove of 500-700 year old sequoias. They are called the Northern Sentinels. They're not huge, the largest just 10 and 12 feet in diameter—though that's still a big tree. But they are no less majestic for their smaller size.

At first, hiking down into the bowl of the park, it's easy to miss some of the smaller trees, or the stand of new growth sequoias planted a few decades ago by local residents. Were it not for the park's interpretive signs, you could walk right past them. But of course you don't. You stop and you marvel at their presence here. You ask, as biologists do, how did they come to be here?

But here they are. Some of the trees are named for World War I veterans—this one, the tallest at 250 feet, though not the biggest—for a French general named Marshal Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre. Here, it stands next to a cedar in the last remains of the winter snow.

Provenance: Phase One XT • IQ4.150 • Rodenstock 32mm & 70mm

Related Posts

For the most famous of the Sierra Nevada sequoia groves, a few hours south: the Generals Highway through Sequoia National Park — the Giant Forest corridor.

Another Sierra Nevada sequoia grove, more accessible but no less ancient: the giant sequoias at Calaveras Big Trees State Park, in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

For the coastal branch of the same ancient family: the old-growth coast redwood trunks at Armstrong Woods, Sonoma County.

Fine Art Giant Sequoia Photography Print

These are California's most remote sequoias — Placer County, ancient and defiant at 500-700 years old. It is a different population from Calaveras or Generals Highway; and even harder to reach.

Northern Sentinels 2

From a different angle and in different light, the same Placer County grove reveals another dimension of the same story — the way sequoias create their own interior weather, their canopies trapping moisture and filtering sun until the forest floor exists in a perpetual soft diffusion. This second medium format panorama from the grove documents the full sweep of the stand, the trees' cinnamon-red bark standing out against the deeper green of the understory. As with #26, the exact grove location within Placer County is flagged for confirmation with Greg before these images are published. The sequoias themselves are not in question — the scale and the species are unmistakable; only the precise place name remains to be confirmed.

Northern Sentinels 1

In the Sierra Nevada, the giant sequoias of Placer County stand apart from the more-visited groves to the south — fewer visitors, quieter mornings, the same unfathomable scale. This medium format panorama required multiple frames assembled to capture trees whose full height cannot be contained in a single exposure from any useful distance. The grove in this image is flagged for location verification with Greg — the "Joffre" designation in the filename refers to a specific section or approach that warrants confirmation before publication. What the image confirms is that no detail is lost in the transition from deeply shadowed forest floor to fully lit canopy above — the full depth of a sequoia grove, rendered at a scale worthy of the subject.