ARNOLD >> For 2,000 years, the “Pioneer Cabin Tree” grew in peaceful grandeur in a land not yet California — reaching ever taller as the Miwoks hunted, the Aztec mined gold, Chinese perfected silk, Romans expanded their empire and waves of new immigrants arrived in America.
Sunday, with the stunning finality of a beheading, it fell.
The aging giant sequoia — known for an immense cabin-shaped hole in its trunk — was pronounced dead at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, toppled by fierce winds and eight inches of rain in its home in the North Grove of Calaveras Big Trees State Park in Arnold, northeast of Stockton.
No one saw it fall, but an astonished park docent discovered the shattered tree on an afternoon walk, then called authorities.
This week, the grove is cordoned off as tree pathologists arrive to conduct a detailed post-mortem. There are no immediate plans for its fate.
“It’s sad from the perspective of human history — how many generations of families have walked through this beautiful tree,” delighting in the huge hole excavated in its trunk, said supervising park ranger Tony Tealdi.
By Monday morning, more than 2,100 people had commented on the Calaveras Big Trees Association’s Facebook post, some sharing stories about their visits over the years.
Truth be told, the tree had been ailing.
“It wasn’t doing very well,” said Tealdi. “There was only one limb alive on it. With the hole cut into it, it was not able to fend off fires and could no longer support the growth at the top of the tree.”
Indeed, the hole — carved out in the 1880s, when the tree was privately owned — appears to have been created after Mother Nature already inflicted a major wound. Old photos show a gaping gash at the base of the tree.
Then, after Yosemite’s “Wawona Tunnel Tree” was carved large enough to accommodate automobiles and became a tourist attraction, the owners of the Pioneer Cabin Tree did the same. The once-popular Arnold site had lost visitor traffic as the roads to Yosemite improved, and owners sought to bring people back.
While the tree may not have been fatally wounded by decades of cars driving through it — long since banned — it was likely weakened by damage to its shallow roots. Sequoia roots extend only six to eight feet underground and can grow as long as a football field in every direction.
It was a giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum, the type of redwood famed for its girth, not height. These sequoias live naturally only in groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. They are the largest living things on earth.
It belongs to a grove that was discovered in the spring of 1852, when a backwoods hunter named Gus Dowd chased a wounded grizzly bear in an unfamiliar forest. Suddenly he was stopped in his tracks by a breathtaking sight — trees of monstrous proportions.
The tree — and its surviving siblings in the park — are ancestral remnants of once-vast conifer forests that blanketed a cooler and wetter California, and now face threats from climate change.
“Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in October 23, 1855.
The tree earned the “Cabin” moniker because the carving was square, but it was also known as the “Pioneer” tree. So state park authorities formally dubbed it the “Pioneer Cabin Tree,” a name that stuck. Its demise was reported by the Calaveras Big Trees Association.
Yet even in death, the tree will remain a marvel — and a critical contributor to the forest ecosystem, said Tealdi.
“That tree will be food and home and shelter for animals, for generations to come,” said Tealdi.
As it decays, “it is nature going back into the forest.”
Staff Writer Daniel Jimenez contributed to this report.
