Sometime in late 1937, a giant sequoia came down across what's now Crescent Meadow Road in the Giant Forest. Nobody cut it, no storm is on record as the cause, and no fire had weakened it. It had simply reached the end of the span a sequoia gets, likely somewhere north of two thousand years, and it fell across a road that hadn't existed when it started growing.
Most fallen trees get cleared. This one got a tunnel instead, cut through its own trunk the following summer so cars could drive through a dead sequoia lying on its side. Nearly ninety years later, it's the last tree of its kind still standing in an American national park, and the park that owns it says, plainly, that it will never build another.
A Tree Older Than the Country
NPS records list the fallen tree at 275 feet, with a base diameter of 21 feet, old enough that its age at death was probably north of two thousand years, though no one cored the stump to confirm an exact figure. Whatever brought it down in late 1937 wasn't logging, fire, or a storm anyone recorded. Giant sequoias die standing more often than they die any other way, and eventually the sheer weight of a tree that size outpaces whatever is still holding its roots to the ground. This one came down across a road built for cars, in a grove already being managed as a park attraction, at a moment when the National Park Service still saw an opportunity in a problem like a fallen tree blocking traffic.
Turning an Obstacle Into a Photo Stop
In the summer of 1938, crews cut a passage straight through the downed trunk rather than moving or removing it. The finished tunnel measures 17 feet wide and 8 feet high, tall enough for most passenger vehicles, with a bypass route built alongside it for RVs and other traffic too tall to fit through. It's been open to cars every summer since, one of the more photographed stretches of road in the entire park, and the tree has never been moved from the spot where it landed.
- Tree fell LATE 1937
- Tunnel cut SUMMER 1938
- Tunnel width 17 FT
- Tunnel height 8 FT
Plan Your Giant Forest Loop
Tunnel Log sits along Crescent Meadow Road, minutes from General Sherman and Moro Rock. The trip planner can string all three into one afternoon.
Open the Trip PlannerThe Wawona Tree Didn't Survive Its Own Tunnel
Sequoia's tunnel tree isn't a one-off idea. Yosemite cut its own tunnel through a living giant sequoia, the Wawona Tree, back in 1881, hand-carved by two men named Scribner who charged 75 dollars and worked outward from an existing fire scar rather than starting fresh. That tree was already ancient by then, likely somewhere between 2,100 and 2,300 years old, standing 234 feet tall with a 26-foot base diameter. It carried traffic and tourists through its trunk for 88 years.
Then, in February 1969, a heavy snow load brought it down. The Park Service's own account of the collapse notes something worth sitting with: cutting the tunnel had put the tree slightly off balance to begin with, a lean that, in the Park Service's words, "increased when the tunnel was completed," and that lean is generally understood to have made the eventual collapse likelier. The fallen trunk, now called the Fallen Tunnel Tree, was left exactly where it landed and is still a stop on the Mariposa Grove trail today.
Standing and Whole Is Worth More Now
Sequoia National Park addresses this head-on in its own published visitor materials, and the reasoning isn't vague. "Tunnel trees had their time and place in the early history of our national parks," the park states. "But today sequoias which are standing healthy and whole are worth far more." That's a direct rejection of the logic that built both Tunnel Log and the Wawona Tree in the first place, the idea that a giant sequoia becomes more valuable to visitors once you can drive through it. Modern park management runs the other direction: an intact grove, left alone, outranks any single novelty built out of it.
Facts and figures checked against NPS.gov's Sequoia & Kings Canyon Tunnel Log FAQ page and the National Park Service's published history of Yosemite's Wawona Tree.
The tree that became Tunnel Log fell on its own, on a night nobody recorded, after a life that started long before the road it landed on. Its Yosemite cousin lasted 88 years with a hole cut through its trunk before the hole helped bring it down. Tunnel Log is still standing, still whole enough to drive through, and the park that maintains it has already told visitors, in writing, that it's the last one they intend to make.