In the photograph, a stagecoach and a team of horses are standing inside a tree. Two men are sitting on the burl at the left, a third is leaning out of the opening, and the whole arrangement is holding still long enough for the exposure. The tree is the Wawona Tunnel Tree, in the Mariposa Grove, and for most of a century this was one of the things you came to Yosemite to do.
The park explained how it was done in its own magazine. In April 1929, Yosemite Nature Notes ran a piece called "Tunneled Trees of Mariposa and Other Groves." It is not an apology. It is a set of measurements, a little history, and a note about how well the photographs were selling.
The whole issue is in the archive here, transcribed from the original scan. What follows is mostly its own account, with the dates left attached.
The article opens with a quotation from an English traveler, W. G. Marshall, who came through the Sierra in June 1878 and wrote it up in a book called Through America, or Nine Months in the United States. He had crossed over from the Calaveras grove and, as he put it, came "upon a novelty such as one does not come across every day": a tunnel cut through the stump of one of the largest sequoias in the Tuolumne Grove, with the wagon road running straight through the middle of it.
"When we reached the middle of it, we pulled up, of course, for here we were with coach and four horses standing inside one of the mammoth trees of California. We waited a considerable time within the tree."
The tunnel was a week old when he saw it. The first coachful had gone through on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 18, 1878.
That tree was already dead. Its trunk had been severed about ninety feet up, and what remained was a barked stump measuring thirty feet eight inches through, from an original trunk the article reports as over forty feet with the bark on. The opening was twelve feet high and ten and a half feet wide at the top. It is called the Dead Giant, and it is still standing.
"Since that time," the article continues, "three living trees have had tunnels chopped through their hearts."
That made four tunnel trees in the entire range of the species, and three of them were inside Yosemite: the Dead Giant in the Tuolumne Grove, and the California and Wawona trees in the Mariposa Grove. The fourth, the Pioneer, stood in the Calaveras grove outside the park.
The Wawona Tree's tunnel was cut by two brothers named Scribner, who were paid seventy-five dollars for the work by the Yosemite Stage and Turnpike Company, shortly after the first road into the Mariposa Grove was completed. The opening was slightly over eight feet wide and twenty-six feet long, which is to say the full diameter of the tree. The tree itself stood 227 feet, and Nature Notes is careful to add that it carried "a beautifully balanced crown."
On when it was cut, the archive does not agree with itself. The 1929 article prints a letter from a Frank Strausser of San Diego, who claimed to have entered the grove in August 1880 with a party of Knights Templar from Philadelphia, and to have sat up with the driver while workmen cleared the blocks of freshly chopped heartwood off the roadway so that his stage could be the first vehicle through. He claimed, on that basis, to have been the first passenger ever carried through the Wawona tree. Fifty-five years later, the same magazine dated the cutting to 1881, in a note about early photographs the park had just acquired. Both are in the record. Only one of them is a memory.
The California Tree was tunneled around 1895, for a reason that is entirely logistical: when snow and mud shut the road into the upper grove, the stage passengers still needed a big tree to be driven through. It is twenty-one feet through and 248 feet high, and it stands about a hundred yards east of the Grizzly Giant. It is still there, and still open.
Halfway down the second column there is a subheading. It reads: Gets the Publicity.
Under it, the article explains that photographs of the Wawona tree, with a troop of cavalry riding four horses abreast through the opening, or the old coach and six drawn up at the exit to be photographed, "are found displayed throughout the civilized world." It has been painted by the foremost artists, and in some cases those paintings have been used commercially in advertising. The tree is, the article concludes, "probably the most famous tree in the world today, as it has had wider publicity than any other individual tree."
That is the whole argument, in the park's own voice, printed in the park's own scientific bulletin. The hole was worth cutting because of what it did for circulation. Nobody in April 1929 seems to have found this worth arguing about.
It is worth knowing that this same magazine changed its mind about things, in public, on a fairly regular schedule. Eight years later a park naturalist used the April 1937 issue to work through, in print, how the nightly bear-feeding show at the garbage pits had gotten away from the park. That one is for another installment.
The Wawona Tunnel Tree fell in the winter of 1968 to 1969, under snow. It was roughly two thousand years old, and it had spent something close to ninety of those years carrying a twenty-six-foot hole through its base. The Park Service left it where it landed and did not cut another one.
The archive records the loss almost in passing. In the 1971 volume, an editor prints the reflections of a longtime visitor who had come by the office to talk about how the park had changed. Her list runs:
"We had a hotel here — burned down. A tunnel tree — it fell one winter, Mirror Lake is half its size of 25 years ago; in time it will fill with silt, then meadow and later forest will march in. We all change."
Forty-two years after the measurements, one clause in somebody else's inventory of losses.
Two of the three are still standing, and both are on foot only now. No stage, no cavalry, no vehicles at all.
The Dead Giant, Tuolumne Grove. The trailhead is on Tioga Road a short distance east of the Crane Flat junction. The route in is the old Big Oak Flat Road, about a mile down and roughly five hundred feet of descent, which means the walk back is five hundred feet of climb at 6,000 feet of elevation. That is the part people underestimate. The tunnel is still cut through the stump, and you can still walk the road grade through it, which is worth doing precisely because it is the same surface the 1878 coach used. Carry water for the climb out.
The California Tree, Mariposa Grove. Continue past the Grizzly Giant on the main grove trail and it is a short distance further along. The Mariposa Grove has a seasonal shuttle from the welcome plaza near the South Entrance; check the Park Bulletin for whether it is running before you plan around it.
The Wawona Tunnel Tree is also still there, lying down. It is well up in the upper grove, a couple of miles and a good deal of climbing past the California Tree, and it is a log now. People walk past it.
The point of going back through these is not nostalgia, and it is definitely not a chance to feel superior to 1929. It is that the park's thinking is preserved with the dates on it, month by month, for five decades, and you can watch it turn.
In April 1929, the tunnel through a two-thousand-year-old sequoia was an accomplishment worth measuring to the half inch and worth putting on a postcard. By 1971 it was one line in a list of things a visitor missed. No retraction was ever printed. The magazine simply stopped writing about the trees that way, and then the tree fell, and then nobody proposed a replacement.
Those are the two documents. They are eleven pages and forty-two years apart, and the argument between them is the whole history of how this place learned to be a park.
From the Archive is an occasional series reading the 512 issues of Yosemite Nature Notes, the National Park Service bulletin published in the park from 1922 onward. The full run is transcribed and searchable at the archive.