Rai Meets His Namesake... Again

It was only 10:00 a.m. but the summer heat was already a bit more than a San Francisco native such as yourself could bear. We tried to hide in the shade of the giant trees that stood around us, but still, the sunrays that passed through the gaps in the canopy above were enough to let in enough heat to make us fog and ocean breeze-loving souls a bit too hot for comfort. You got a bit red and tried to nestle in deeper into the blankets that we had wrapped around you to keep you out of the sun. We did what we could too; we covered you in little cloths soaked in cold water and had a little water sprayer ready by your side. Despite this new foe, the hot sun, you stayed awake and keenly observed nature's giants standing all around you. We were walking in a grove of giant redwoods.
As you know by now, Rai, your surname - sequoia - is the name of the world's giant redwood trees. But, did you know that there are two different types of redwoods in the Golden State?
There are the coastal redwoods (sequoia sempervirens) which grow in the coastal mountains along the Pacific coast of North America and are not found more than 50 miles inland. The other redwoods are the 'giant' or 'sierra' redwood (sequoiadendron giganteum) which are limited to the western slopes of Sierra Nevada mountains of California with only 68 groves remaining.
Both types of redwoods are known for their thick, red-colored trunks, but it is the aptly named giant sequoias of the inland mountains that are the larger of the two. The coastal redwoods may be taller, but it is the giant sequoias that are significantly larger in width. The sierra redwoods truly are the giant's of the world's forests.
In your short 2 months, you've already seen the coastal redwoods several times so it was time that you met your namesake... again. It was time that you met the sierra redwoods. A good number of the largest trees in the world are found in and around Sequoia National Park not far from Los Angeles. This past weekend, we were head to Lake Tahoe, not L.A. so we decided to show you one of the most northern groves of giant sequoia in Calaveras Big Trees Preserve.
So, this is how you found yourself observing the largest trees in the world on an especially hot summer day. Unfortunately, the largest tree in this particular grove is known as the 'Big Stump' because when first discovered, the man was so awestruck by the size of these almost two thousand year old trees that he cut the largest down just so that he could prove the size to others. Like us, as we stood by the 'Big Stump', you wondered how one's first instinct when seeing these incredible trees could be so different from person to person.