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.
