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It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

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Famous sequoia tree falls

The Pioneer Cabin Tree, the California sequoia that had had a tunnel carved in it in the 1880s so that people, and for a time cars, could travel through, has fallen.

Jim Allday of Arnold is a volunteer at the park who was working there Sunday. He said the tree went down about 2 p.m. and “shattered” on impact. He said people had been walking through the tree as recently as Sunday morning.

It’s not clear why the tree fell, but probably had to do with the giant sequoia’s shallow root system — the roots only go about two or four feet deep — and the fact that the trail around the tree was flooded due to rain. “When I went out there (Sunday afternoon), the trail was literally a river, the trail is washed out,” Allday said. “I could see the tree on the ground, it looked like it was laying in a pond or lake with a river running through it.”

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

7 comments

  • Cotour

    “Its not clear why the tree fell”

    Maybe this had something to do with it:

    “The tree was hollowed out in the 1880s to allow tourists to pass through it, ”

    They cut a 10′ by 10′ hole in the thing! Duh!

  • LocalFluff

    Did anyone hear it fall?

  • Cotour

    Yes, but the person that heard it fall is an Obama supporter and could not bear the truth, so in their telling of the story its still standing.

  • The first fallen celebrity of 2017.

  • Laurie

    Localfluff – beat me to it ;)

  • Edward

    Cotour,
    It sounds like that person is in his safe space.

    There aren’t many drive-through trees left. It seems that two of them have fallen in the past half century, and one of them, like the Pioneer Cabin Tree, is no longer available to drive through but is available to walk through.
    https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev3_058751.pdf

    When I was a wee little tyke, just old enough to remember the excitement of it, my family drove through the Wawona Tree in Yosemite, probably contributing — along with the hole in it — to its demise a few years later. Sorry about that. At the time, it seemed like fun, although too brief.

  • Would the tree still stand if it didn’t get hollowed out?

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