SAN JOSE, Calif. _ 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 Aztecs 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 8 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 because the trail was closed due to rising creek waters. 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 postmortem. 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.
"It is so so sad," said Mariam Alsugire, 18, of Oakley, who visited the tree last week. "It was so beautiful; I feel so lucky to have seen it. It was worth the trip.
"I walked through it. It was so big it could fit 15 to 20 people inside the trunk," said Alsugire. "There were icicles of tree sap hanging down, and below the trunk was ice and snow. To see it in winter was such a cool experience."
Truth be told, the tree had been ailing.
"It wasn't doing very well," said Tealdi, saying it suffered from trunk and root decay. "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 1881, when the tree was privately owned _ appears to have been created after Mother Nature already inflicted a major wound. Old photos show a gaping hole in the trunk, caused by lightning strikes in the 1800s. Lightning later knocked off its crown and opened up its side.
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. For the next 60 years, tourists rode horses and carriages, then drove cars, through the tree.
While the tree may not have been fatally wounded by decades of traffic driving through it _ long since banned _ it was likely weakened by damage to its shallow roots. Sequoia roots extend only 6 to 8 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. It stood approximately 100 feet tall and was 22 feet in diameter at breast height. 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 Pioneer Cabin Tree was one of the last of the historic "tunnel redwoods" in the Sierra, said Tealdi. The Palace Hotel Tree and Smith Cabin Tree remain standing in the more remote South Grove at the park. Yosemite's Wawona tree still stands, as do three coast redwood "tunnel trees" in northwestern California.
The felled sequoia _ and its 150 surviving siblings in the grove _ was an ancestral remnant 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 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."
