I discovered Nelder Grove in 1969. John Muir discovered it in 1875, and John Nelder discovered it a bit before Muir. It’s safe to say that the Indians of the Sierra saw it hundreds of years before any of the rest of us.

Muir was hiking in the Sierra Nevada a bit south of what is now Yosemite National Park and a few miles east of the future California Highway 41, seeking redwood trees. He spotted the grove from nearby Fresno Dome, and when he hiked to the trees, he found Nelder, a retired miner, living in a rough cabin. The grove was first called Fresno Grove, but the name was later changed to honor the old pioneer.

Nelder is one of eight relatively small giant sequoia groves north of the Kings River (there are dozens of groves, some with hundreds of trees, south of the Kings). The best known is the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park. Nelder, located about five miles south as the hawk flies, is probably the least known. Nelder Campground is located about 10 miles off Highway 41, and the last few miles is a rough dirt forest road.

The first thought that strikes the visitor arriving at Nelder Campground is "they cut down the trees!" And indeed, dozens of the huge trees were cut between 1888 and 1892, by the Madera Flume and Trading Company, which operated three mills in the area.

Cutting one of these forest giants was a week’s work. Because of the brittleness of the wood, it was necessary first to build a bed of branches to soften the fall. Then, standing on springboards notched into the thick bark 15 to 30 feet above the ground, the logger would chop out the undercut and cut through a thousand year’s growth with saws 25 feet or more in length.

Once the tree was down, it was stripped of its bark, and logs of workable size were bucked out. Much of the wood above the first hundred feet or so was left on the ground, where it can still be found, as solid as the day it fell.

The Madera Flume & Trading Company fell on hard times, and was taken over by the Madera Sugar Pine Co., which became the most successful and longest lived logging operation in the southern Sierra. Although this outfit lived up to its name and cut mostly sugar pine, it did produce a small amount of redwood lumber from some of the logs left on the ground by its predecessor.

Despite the logging operations, which were unfortunately careless and wasteful, many giant trees, too large to cut and work with, still stand; and Nelder Grove is also notable for the many young Sequoias which flourish in the area.

Today most of the signs of this pre-conservation era logging have been erased by nature and the careful management of the United States Forest Service. But the huge stumps still stand as a monument to the determination and ingenuity of man, and as a reminder that nature’s resources are not given to us in endless supply.

On my first visit to the Bull Buck I had to stand within 20 feet of the tree and tilt my head way back to see the top; now you can stand far enough away to get the entire tree in the viewfinder of your camera. Trails have been built from the campground through the woods, although one is officially closed .