Kings Canyon National Park is a national park of the United States in the southern Sierra Nevada, in Fresno and Tulare Counties, California. Originally established in 1890 as General Grant National Park, the park was greatly expanded and renamed on March 4, 1940. The park's namesake, Kings Canyon, is a rugged glacier-carved valley more than a mile (1,600 m) deep. Other natural features include multiple peaks, high mountain meadows, swift-flowing rivers, and some of the world's largest stands of giant sequoia trees. Kings Canyon is north of and contiguous with Sequoia National Park, and both parks are jointly administered by the National Park Service as the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
The majority of the park, drained by the Middle and South Forks of the Kings River and many smaller streams, is designated wilderness. Tourist facilities are concentrated in two areas: Grant Grove, home to General Grant (the second largest tree in the world, measured by trunk volume) and Cedar Grove, located in the heart of Kings Canyon. Overnight hiking is required to access most of the park's backcountry, or high country, which for much of the year is covered in deep snow. The combined Pacific Crest Trail/John Muir Trail, a backpacking route, traverses the entire length of the park from north to south.
General Grant National Park was initially created to protect a small area of giant sequoias from logging. Although John Muir's visits brought public attention to the huge wilderness area to the east, it took more than fifty years for the rest of Kings Canyon to be designated a national park. Environmental groups, park visitors and many local politicians wanted to see the area preserved; however, development interests wanted to build hydroelectric dams in the canyon. Even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the park in 1940, the fight continued until 1965, when the Cedar Grove and Tehipite Valley dam sites were finally annexed into the park.
As visitation rose post–World War II, further debate took place over whether the park should be developed as a tourist resort, or retained as a more natural environment restricted to simpler recreation such as hiking and camping. Ultimately, the preservation lobby prevailed and today, the park has only limited services and lodgings despite its size. Due to this and the lack of road access to most of the park, Kings Canyon remains the least visited of the major Sierra parks, with just under 700,000 visitors in 2017 compared to 1.3 million visitors at Sequoia and over 4 million at Yosemite.
Geography and natural history
Kings Canyon National Park, located on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada to the east of the San Joaquin Valley, is divided into two distinct sections. The smaller and older western section centers around Grant Grove – home of many of the park's sequoias – and has most of the visitor facilities. The larger eastern section, which accounts for the majority of the park's area, is almost entirely wilderness, and contains the deep canyons of the Middle and South Forks of the Kings River. Cedar Grove, located at the bottom of the Kings Canyon, is the only part of the park's vast eastern portion accessible by road (via Highway 180). Although most of the park is forested, much of the eastern section consists of alpine regions above the tree line. Usually snow-free only from late June until late October, the high country is accessible solely via foot and horse trails.
The Sequoia-Kings Canyon Wilderness encompasses over in Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, or nearly 90 percent of their combined area. In addition to Sequoia National Park on the south, Kings Canyon is surrounded by multiple national forests and wilderness areas. The Sierra National Forest, Sequoia National Forest and Inyo National Forest border it on the northwest, west and east, respectively. The John Muir Wilderness wraps around much of the northern half of the park, and the Monarch Wilderness preserves much of the area between the park's two sections.
Mountains and valleys Kings Canyon is characterized by some of the steepest vertical relief in North America, with numerous peaks over on the Sierra Crest along the park's eastern border, falling to in the valley floor of Cedar Grove just to the west. The Sierran crest forms the eastern boundary of the park, from Mount Goethe in the north, down to Junction Peak, at the boundary with Sequoia National Park. Several passes cross the crest into the park, including Bishop Pass, Taboose Pass, Sawmill Pass, and Kearsarge Pass. All of these passes are above in elevation.
There are several prominent subranges of the Sierra within and around the park. The Palisades, along the park's eastern boundary, have four peaks over including the highest point in the park, at the summit of North Palisade. The Great Western Divide extends through the south-central part of the park and also has many peaks over , including Mount Brewer. The Monarch Divide, stretching between the lower Middle and South Forks of the Kings, has some of the most inaccessible terrain in the entire park. In the northwest section of the park are other very steep and rugged ranges such as the Goddard Divide, LeConte Divide and Black Divide, all of which are dotted with high mountain lakes and separated by deep chasms.
Most of the mountains and canyons, as in other parts of the Sierra Nevada, are formed in igneous intrusive rocks such as granite, diorite and monzonite, formed at least 100 million years ago due to subduction along the North American–Pacific Plate boundary. However, the Sierra itself is a young mountain range, no more than 10 million years old. Huge tectonic forces along the western edge of the Great Basin forced the local crustal block to tilt and uplift, creating the mountains' gradual slope to the west and the nearly vertical escarpment to the east bordering the Owens Valley. Many cave systems are also formed in the rock layers, including Boyden Cave along the South Fork of the Kings River.
Glacial features
The present shape of the high country was largely sculpted by glaciations during successive Ice Ages over the last 2.5 million years. Large valley glaciers moved as far as down the South and Middle Forks of the Kings River, carving out the distinctive deep U-shaped valleys at Cedar Grove and Paradise Valley on the South Fork, and Tehipite Valley on the Middle Fork. Ice Age glaciations did not extend all the way to the confluence of the Middle and South Forks; consequently, the canyons downstream of Cedar Grove and Tehipite are typical V-shaped river gorges, in contrast to the U-shaped valleys upstream.
The glacial valleys are characterized by flat floors and exposed granite cliffs and domes many thousands of feet high, similar in form to the more famous Yosemite Valley to the north, and in fact the term "yosemite" was used in the 19th century by John Muir to describe these valleys before they were widely known by their own names. In A Rival of the Yosemite, published in 1891 in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Muir wrote of Kings Canyon:
Other significant glacial features include Tehipite Dome, the largest granite dome in the Sierra, rising above the floor of Tehipite Valley. In Kings Canyon and across the high country, such sheer granite cliffs are subject to exfoliation, frost weathering and earthquakes which cause sudden and dramatic rockfalls. Over thousands of years, cliff collapses have built up large talus piles or scree slopes at their bases along almost every glacial valley in the park.
Zumwalt Meadow, one of the few large areas of flat land in the park, was formed by the accumulation of sediment behind the terminal moraine of a retreating glacier. In Kings Canyon there are in fact four such moraines, which the Kings River cascades over, forming whitewater rapids, in an area where it otherwise winds calmly across meadows. The series of moraines one behind the other are termed "nested moraines", each created during a different glacial period by glaciers of varying length.
Elsewhere in the high country, the landscape of bare rock and talus left by former glaciers is replete with hanging valleys, waterfalls, serrated ridges (arêtes), cirques, and hundreds of alpine tarns. Some of the highest peaks retain permanent snowfields and even glaciers. Palisade Glacier, the largest in the Sierra, is located near the park's edge in the John Muir Wilderness. These glaciers are not holdovers from the Ice Ages; rather, they were most likely formed during cold periods in the last 1,000 years. The park's glaciers are now melting rapidly due to increased temperatures, and may disappear completely within a few decades.
Watersheds
A number of major Sierra rivers have their origins in the park. The South Fork Kings River flows from near Taboose Pass, on the park's eastern boundary, and drains much of the southern half of the park, carving the canyon from which the park takes its name. The Middle Fork Kings River originates near Mount Powell and drains most of the park's northern half. A smaller section in the northern tip of the park is drained by the South Fork of the San Joaquin River. The Kings River falls more than from the Sierra crest to Pine Flat Reservoir in the San Joaquin Valley – the longest undammed drop of any North American river.
Most of the park's borders are formed by watershed divides between river basins. The eastern boundary follows the Sierra Crest, which to the east is drained by the Owens River, part of the Great Basin watershed. The southern boundary with Sequoia National Park is the divide between the Kings, Kaweah and Kern Rivers. Part of the western boundary follows the divide between the Middle and North Forks of the Kings River.
The forks of the Kings River converge in the Sequoia National Forest, a few miles outside the western boundary of the park, to form the main stem of the river. Here, the river forms one of the deepest canyons in North America, its walls rising as much as from river to rim – about half a mile (0.8 km) deeper than the Grand Canyon. The canyons upstream at Cedar Grove are also more than deep. Although the geology and topography of Cedar Grove and Tehipite Valley are similar to that of Yosemite Valley, the park does not have waterfalls as high and spectacular as those in Yosemite. There are several powerful but short waterfalls including Mist Falls, Roaring River Falls and Grizzly Falls in the Cedar Grove area. The backcountry is home to some much higher falls. Silver Spray Falls in Tehipite Valley drops about in several tiers. In a 1910 article in Out West, Ernestine Winchell describes the falls and Tehipite Valley:
Both the Kings and San Joaquin Rivers flow west into the arid San Joaquin Valley; however, while the San Joaquin eventually empties into San Francisco Bay, the Kings ends in the terminal sink of Tulare Lake, which – before its waters were diverted for irrigation – was one of the largest freshwater lakes in the western United States. The seasonal rise and fall of the park's rivers is driven by heavy snowfall (typically between November and April) followed by a rapid melt during May and June. Runoff drops significantly by late July (or August in wet years), and rivers are usually a trickle by autumn. Snow accumulations in the higher areas of Kings Canyon National Park can be extremely large, often totaling in the hundreds of inches, although the annual snowpack fluctuates greatly between wet and dry years.
Climate
According to the Köppen climate classification system, most of Kings Canyon National Park has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb), with only the lowest of elevations having a hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Csa). According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the Plant Hardiness zone at Cedar Grove Visitor Center at elevation is 8a with an average annual extreme minimum temperature of .
Plants and wildlife