Joyce Brown was 12 when her parents first took her to visit the “drive-thru tree,” a giant sequoia in California famous for a car-sized hole carved into the base of its trunk.
Brown thought she had entered a land of giants as she walked underneath and around the ancient 100-foot-tall tree, which was toppled by a massive storm on Sunday.
“It’s kind of like someone in the family has died,” said Brown, a 65-year-old retired middle school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who spends about a third of the year at her family’s cabin in Arnold, about 4 miles from where the now-fallen tree lies dead in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
Four generations of Brown’s family have spent countless hours at the tree and often took out-of-town visitors there, some from as far away as Turkey.
In May 2015, she and her husband showed off the tree to John and Lesley Ripper, a Michigan couple the Browns befriended on an African safari.
“I was blown away,” said John Ripper, a 55-year-old printer in Northville, Michigan. “I’ve traveled to 70 countries. But that particular tree and being able to walk underneath it and touch it was quite a memorable moment and something I won’t soon forget.”
Ripper said he can’t believe that a storm felled such a massive, sturdy-looking tree.
“In the blink of an eye, it’s gone,” he said. “There’s this giant tree everyone remembers, and it’s going to be laying there in plain sight. The dead giant.”
(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Sumner Crawford of Charleston, South Carolina, remembers every detail of his first visit to the tree as a kid in the early 1990s.
“I remember I was walking through the tree and thinking, ‘I’m inside of the tree right now!'” he said. “It was madness.”
Crawford, 36, was stunned by the sequoia’s size: When his family of four tried to join hands around the tree they discovered they couldn’t even come close.
“It was so different and so odd,” Crawford said, adding that he recently visited the tree again and relived those memories.
“I feel like it’s part of my personal history. So it’s a bummer to see it go,” he said.
The tunnel that made the tree famous and ultimately weakened it was carved into its trunk in the 1880s to allow tourists to pass through, first with horses and buggies and later with cars. The tunnel was limited to pedestrians in recent decades.
The largest tree species in the world, sequoias can reach diameters up to 27 feet and have shallow root systems that make them vulnerable to toppling.
The drive-thru tree had a diameter of 22 feet and was about 2,000 years old, said Tony Tealdi, a supervising ranger at California State Parks.
When the already mostly dead tree hit the ground on Sunday, it shattered and is now completely unrecognizable, said Jim Allday, a volunteer at Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
“It was majestic,” he said. “Now it’s basically a pile of rubble.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
I am sad that such a beautiful giant is fallen.
I am saddened, but it was the will of God that this happened. I really appreciated the old tree.
Impact tourism for area for sure, But rebuild forest & hope for another like tree to rise.
For now lumber for homes, firewood alone.
We have pictures of us in that tree. So sad that it’s gone. SCK.
In 1933 my parents took my sister and me to the West from New York to visit relatives in California (i was 11 years old) and my father drove us through that magnificent tree. I am saddened to think that future generations will not have the that thrill of the moment
So sad that this tree is gone. But what did people expect, with that giant hole cut into it, destabilizing it. Surprised it lasted this long. It may have been a tourist draw, but it was disrespectful to the living entity, the tree, to cut that hole.
So sad to see and hear of this beautiful tree fallen!
I am in mourning even thou i have never seen the great tree personally. 🙁
It is legendary. Most everybody knows about it.
It was born in biblical times which is amazing !
RIP great and majestic tree !
Here is the next question, will the park be good stewarts and use the tree for good at this point, at least for firewood or simply waste it.
If morons didn’t cut car sized holes thru the trunks on these beautiful giants, that tree would still be here for everybody to enjoy.
What did you expect when you cut the center of a tree completely out then hit it with high winds, A little common sense should be applied here.
We were there in the 70’s and drove our car though it with our 5 children. I still have the picture of it. So sad it was destroyed.