A recent storm brought high winds, rain, and snow to Northern California, and those conditions took down the iconic Pioneer Cabin Tree at Calaveras Big Trees State Park. The tree was known as the Tunnel Tree because of a tunnel carved into its broad base 137 years ago. It fell to the ground on Sunday, January 8, 2017, after a powerful storm system pounded the Sierra Nevada with heavy rain, high winds, and rising creek levels throughout the region.
What Caused the Pioneer Cabin Tree to Fall
According to California State Parks, a combination of trunk and root decay, combined with storm water runoff, brought the giant sequoia down at its base. The tree shattered as it hit the ground, also taking down a nearby cedar tree in the process. Almost a foot of rain had already fallen at Calaveras Big Trees State Park over the two weeks leading up to the storm, with more than three inches falling on the day the tree came down. No visitors were injured; the trail leading to the tree had been closed ahead of the storm due to the heavy downpour and rising creek levels.
A Piece of California Tourism History
Visitors were once able to drive their cars directly through the base of the Pioneer Cabin Tree, but in more recent years, access had been limited to hikers along a 1.5-mile loop trail. The opening in the trunk was carved into the tree’s base in the 1880s, where a naturally occurring fire scar already existed — a common technique used at the time to create “tunnel trees” as tourist attractions throughout the Sierra Nevada.
For roughly 60 years, visitors rode horses and carriages directly through the tree’s hollowed-out trunk, and by the 1920s, automobiles were driving through it as well. Thousands of tourists posed for photos inside the tunnel over the decades, and hikers walking through in later years could still see graffiti and etchings dating back to the tree’s earliest days as a roadside attraction.
The Pioneer Cabin Tree measured approximately 19 feet in diameter (about 33 feet in circumference, measured six feet above the ground) and stood roughly 205 feet tall. It was one of the last surviving “tunnel trees” in the Sierra Nevada — a small handful of giant sequoias and coast redwoods that were hollowed out in the 1800s to promote tourism, including the famous Wawona Tree in Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove, which fell in 1969.
Giant Sequoias: Some of the Oldest Living Things on Earth
Giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are the largest tree species on Earth by volume and are found naturally only in a narrow band of the western Sierra Nevada in California. The grove of sequoias at Calaveras Big Trees State Park contains more than 150 specimens, some estimated to be around 2,000 years old, with several trees throughout the broader species range towering over 250 feet tall. The Pioneer Cabin Tree itself was believed to be more than 1,000 years old at the time it fell — meaning it had likely been standing since before the Norman Conquest of England.
Calaveras Big Trees State Park became an official California state park in 1931, specifically to preserve and protect the North Grove of giant sequoias, of which the Pioneer Cabin Tree was one of the star attractions.
Why Tunnel Trees Damage Sequoias
While tunnel trees captured the public imagination for generations, carving a hole through a living tree’s trunk causes lasting structural damage. Removing large sections of a tree’s base weakens its ability to support its own enormous weight and interferes with its root and vascular systems, leaving trees like Pioneer Cabin more vulnerable over time to exactly the kind of storm-driven collapse that ultimately brought it down. Modern conservation practices no longer permit this kind of tourist infrastructure to be built into living trees, and the surviving tunnel trees in California’s parks are now viewed as historical curiosities from an earlier, more consumptive era of park tourism rather than models to be replicated.
What Remains Today
Two other historic tunnel trees still stand in the more remote South Grove Nature Preserve at Calaveras Big Trees State Park: the Palace Hotel Tree and the Smith Cabin Tree. Beyond Calaveras, a few other tunnel trees remain in California’s park system, including the California Tree in Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove and a small number of coast redwood tunnel trees in the northwestern part of the state.
The fall of the Pioneer Cabin Tree marks the end of an era for one of California’s oldest and most beloved tourist attractions. While the tree itself is gone, its legacy — both in the countless family photos taken inside its trunk over more than a century and in the scientific data it left behind — continues on.
