Some trees are old. Some trees are tall. And then there is The President, a giant sequoia standing in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, California, that manages to be almost unfathomably massive in a way that photographs have historically failed to capture, because a single frame simply cannot hold it. Estimated at roughly 3,200 years old, it was already a mature tree when the Roman Republic was founded, and it was standing centuries before that, quietly adding rings while entire civilizations rose and fell.
National Geographic’s December 2012 issue was devoted to the world’s biggest trees, and photographer Michael Nichols spent weeks in the Giant Forest with a team of scientists, climbers, and riggers (including canopy researchers whose redwood and sequoia fieldwork has repeatedly appeared in the magazine), documenting The President from base to crown. The resulting image, Forest Giant, is a composite of 126 separate photographs stitched into a single portrait, the only way to represent a tree whose crown alone is wider than most city blocks. It remains one of the most technically ambitious tree photographs ever produced, and it is the reason a decade-old giant sequoia suddenly became a global news story.
So is The President really the largest tree on Earth? Not quite, and the real answer is more interesting than the myth. That title belongs to its neighbor a few miles away in the same Giant Forest: the General Sherman Tree, whose roughly 52,500 cubic feet of trunk volume make it the most massive single tree ever measured. When National Geographic’s story ran, The President was reported as the world’s second-largest tree by volume; a subsequent laser-scanning study published shortly after re-ranked it third, behind Sherman and the General Grant Tree in nearby Kings Canyon National Park. The reshuffling barely matters in practical terms: these are the top three sequoias on the planet, separated by margins that would be a rounding error on any ordinary tree. What makes The President remarkable isn’t a number on a leaderboard; it’s that its trunk holds its girth unusually high into the canopy instead of tapering quickly, packing an extraordinary volume of wood into a tree that’s actually shorter than Sherman.
There is also a harder truth behind these photographs now. The Giant Forest that shelters both The President and General Sherman has come under real, documented threat in recent years. During the 2021 KNP Complex Fire, park staff wrapped General Sherman’s base in fire-resistant aluminum foil blankets as flames approached the grove, an extraordinary emergency measure for a tree that has survived thousands of years of natural fire cycles on its own. It worked, and the grove was spared. But giant sequoias elsewhere in the southern Sierra Nevada were not as fortunate: the 2020 Castle Fire alone is estimated to have killed thousands of large, old-growth sequoias, a scale of loss that would have been almost unthinkable a generation ago. Giant sequoias evolved to depend on low-intensity fire (it clears competing vegetation and helps their cones release seed), but the hotter, more intense wildfires driven by drought and a warming climate are a different threat entirely, one these ancient trees did not evolve to withstand. It is a sobering footnote to a photograph that was, in 2012, simply a celebration of scale.
None of that diminishes the wonder of standing beneath The President, or of Nichols’ achievement in getting it onto a single page. If anything, it raises the stakes: these are not just the largest living things most of us will ever see, they are among the oldest continuously living organisms on the planet, and their survival is no longer guaranteed by size alone. For more on the natural phenomena and living wonders that keep earning a place on this site, our Nature and Science hubs are good places to keep exploring.
