The General Sherman, a giant sequoia in California's southern Sierra Nevada, is as wide as a three-lane highway, nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and older than Christ. It's the champion of big trees, recognized as such for decades by American Forests, a nonprofit that has been ranking the world's biggest trees since 1940. 

Yet, according to some tree experts, Sherman's top ranking should come with an asterisk. It all depends on how you define biggest.

Sherman doesn't rise nearly as high as the world's tallest trees, but it maintains impressive girth in its upper reaches. For that reason, according to Stephen C. Sillett, a leading redwood expert at Humboldt State University, it's the undisputed champ in total biomass, estimated at 52,500 cubic feet — enough to fill about 20 typical swimming pools. 

But for many big tree connoisseurs, including American Forests, the more compelling measurement of size uses a point system that considers height, circumference, and average crown spread. By that score, Sherman is almost certainly surpassed by several of its cousins in the redwood forests of the North Coast, said Matt Ritter, a tree expert at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "And most people who are in the know, know that to be the case," he added.

Take Grogan's Fault, first documented by tree hunters Mario Vaden and Chris Atkins in 2014. Bushwhacking through dense growth within the Redwood State and National Parks, the pair was awestruck as the colossus came into view. "Finally, we got down to measuring," Vaden said, "and we're going, 'Oh, man, this isn't only as big as the largest coast redwoods. This is larger than anything found.' Its dimensions get so extreme it's just hard to soak it in."

According to their measurements, Grogan's Fault is 86 feet around, beating Sherman by about a foot. It also rises more than 35 feet higher. And there are other coast redwoods known to elite tree hunters that are said to rival Grogan's Fault. 

But good luck finding them. Past experience has made many tree discoverers hesitant to disclose locations or to nominate potential record holders to American Forests. In 2007, for example, hints emerged about the location of the Grove of Titans, a fabled stand of gargantuan redwoods in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. As visitors descended on the area, it started to resemble the "L.A. freeway system," a park superintendent said.

So the General Sherman remains No. 1. For ordinary visitors, the scoring of the very biggest trees should be of little matter anyway, said Ritter. "We're talking about small differences here," he said. "You can't tell them apart. You look at it and you're like, 'That's a big f— tree.'"

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Mike McPhate

Elite big tree hunters are making new discoveries in the teeming redwood forests of Northern California.

The secret colossal trees of California's North Coast

California is a land of white sand beaches and glistening granite peaks, but also of incinerated forests and dessicated hillsides. It's this second California that has drawn the eye of the Thomas Heinser.

For five years or so, the German-born, San Francisco-based photographer has made a study of the state's scarred landscapes.

His images, shot from the open side of a helicopter, focus on the after-effects of drought, wildfire, and human profit. The works, he said, amount to a warning about our environmental future, even as they insist on beauty. 

Bathed in the faint glow of sunrise and lacking any horizon, the pictures look like they could be abstract paintings in a museum. "That's the only way I feel like I can show it," Heinser said. "I am a photographer foremost."

Heinser shared a series of his photos, below, with the California Sun.

Thomas Heinser's aerial photographs of California's scarred landscapes look like abstract paintings.

Photographs of a California beautiful and battered

For a brief period before the Gold Rush, San Francisco was largely a Mormon town.

It was on this week in 1846 that the ship Brooklyn landed at San Francisco, then Yerba Buena. It carried 238 weary Mormons who had completed an epic journey from New York, five times farther than that of the Plymouth Pilgrims, in search of freedom from religious persecution.

They doubled the population of San Francisco, and took a central role in many of California's early historical developments. Within a year, they built 100 permanent structures in San Francisco, including the first bank, library, and English-speaking school. The group's leader, Sam Brannan, started the city's first newspaper, the California Star, and became its first millionaire. Other Mormons founded towns, pioneered farming, and became among the first gold miners.

For a time, San Francisco seemed like it could become the headquarters of the Mormon church. In 1847, Brannan traveled to meet the church's president, Brigham Young, who was himself journeying west via land, to plead with him to continue on to the paradise he had found in California. Young refused, preferring the isolation of Utah's Salt Lake Valley.

Still, California became firmly established within the so-called Mormon Corridor, adding another major Mormon foothold in the San Bernardino Valley that rivaled Los Angeles in size. Over the generations, the church's membership in California has grown steadily. Today, more Mormons live in California than any state but Utah.

When San Francisco was a Mormon town

Before white settlers stampeded into California in a quest for gold, an earlier wave of colonizers arrived in the name of God. Beginning in the 18th century, Spanish priests established a series of religious outposts in California in an effort to convert the indigenous population. The first — Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcala — turned 250 this year and was dedicated by Junipero Serra on this week in 1769.

Generations of California fourth graders learned about the missions as tile-and-adobe wonderlands where Franciscan friars lived in harmony with the Native Americans. But there was a darker reality: a catastrophic decline of Indians that some historians have likened to extermination.

Outrages accumulated soon after the Franciscans arrived in San Diego: Native Americans were whipped for participating in a pagan dance, for example, and several indigenous women were raped by Spanish soldiers. After six years of tensions, Kumeyaay warriors surrounded the mission, set it aflame, and killed three Spaniards, including a priest. The offensive was ultimately thwarted. But had it prevailed, the historian George Yagi Jr. wrote, it could have inspired a broader revolt that imperiled the entire Spanish project.

As it happened, the Franciscans went on to string a total of 21 missions along the Pacific coast like rosary beads, laying the foundations for California as we now know it. 

 William McCarthy/California State Archives

The first Franciscan mission in California was dedicated in San Diego on this week 250 years ago. Outrages accumulated quickly.

The Indian revolt that nearly led California down a wholly different path

Decay festers all around at the Salton Sea, the vast inland lake in Southern California that once hosted beauty pageants and boat races in its tourist heyday.

Pollution, drought, and blistering heat conspired to end the fun, killing off fish en masse and leaving communities abandoned along the shore.  

But new life is moving into the breach. At Bombay Beach, artists drawn by the cheap prices and surreal setting have been snapping up lots and crumbling buildings as gallery spaces.

The signature event of the year is the Bombay Beach Biennale (it actually happens yearly), a free three-day festival of art, music, and ideas that was held last weekend. It included DJ dance parties, a post-apocalyptic drive-in, lectures on postmodernism, and dozens of art installations and performances. 

The vision for the event, which was started a few years ago by creative types from Los Angeles, is to establish a lasting outpost for art in the square-mile town of roughly 150 full-time residents. Many of the large-scale works remain on display year-round. 

"It's really more of a block party," said Lauren Brand, a festival organizer. "It's meant to be a celebration of and for the residents of Bombay Beach."

The festival's creators have been wary of allowing it to grow into a Burning Man-like colossus. That's one reason why, leading up to the event, the dates are kept secret. Those who score tickets agree to a strict policy: No spectators allowed; everyone participates.

The festival shared a bunch of photos captured during the festivities last weekend. Here's a selection. 

Organizers of the Bombay Beach Biennale are turning an abandoned town into a lasting outpost for art. 

Artists are bringing new life to a town on the dying Salton Sea

Every so often, the clouds seem to turn black and dance above the fields of California. 

They are thousands of European starlings performing one of nature’s most extraordinary — and mysterious — shows. When they assemble in the sky, the birds form synchronized blobs known as murmurations that twirl and throb and swoop. The most popular theory for the phenomenon: It confuses predators. 

The European starling was introduced to North America in the late 1800s by a Shakespeare lover who wanted to import every bird mentioned in the Bard’s plays as a tribute. They multiplied fantastically fast, raiding farm fields and populating every corner of the country.

California, with its vast agricultural regions, is now among the most reliable destinations for witnessing a starling display.

It's there that Nick Dunlop developed his fascination. The photographer, based in Sebastopol, has become a connoisseur of one of the avian world's most heart-pounding aerial dramas: the pursuit of starling prey by hungry peregrine falcons and other raptors.

Giant flocks might seem like easy pickings for the blisteringly fast peregrine, but the hunts often involve numerous missed strikes before a capture is made. "They can fly incredibly well," Dunlop said of the starlings. "I mean, it's amazing that here's the fastest bird in the world kind of getting outsmarted by them."

Dunlop shared a selection of his photos with the California Sun.

A California photographer captures one of the avian world’s most spectacular aerial dramas: the pursuit of European starlings by peregrine falcons.

The dance of hungry peregrine falcons and twirling murmurations

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After a wet and wild winter, the Flower Fields in Carlsbad are shaping up for one of the best seasons ever.

For 10 weeks each year, the working farm lets the public wander its carefully manicured rows of white, red, yellow, purple, pink, and orange blossoms perched on 50 gently sloping acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The flowers are ranunculuses, a member of the buttercup family. But generations of cultivation have made them unlike any ranunculuses in the world.

The origins of the Flower Fields date to the 1920s when a settler first began planting ranunculus seeds, native to Asia. A flower business was born, and each year only the healthiest and brightest flowers would be used to produce seeds for the next crop.

The early ranunculuses had just five petals in shades of red or yellow. Over the years, they’ve developed long stems, spirals of multi-layered petals, and more than a dozen colors, including the variegated picotee.

The opening of the Flower Fields became synonymous with the start of spring in San Diego’s north county. More than 100,000 people visit each year.

The fields will be open from March 1 through mid-May. Tickets are $18 for adults, $9 for children. Amy Ortega, a spokeswoman, said the best time to go is in April, when millions of flowers are blooming at once. “There really is nothing else like it,” she said.

Below is a series of images from past blooms at the Flower Fields.

After weeks of robust rainfall, the Flower Fields in Carlsbad is shaping up for one of its best seasons ever.

Eruption of color is a rite of spring at Carlsbad's Flower Fields

In 1852, three black men — Carter Perkins, Robert Perkins, and Sandy Jones — were asleep in a cabin when a group of armed whites broke in, loaded the men into a wagon, and hauled them before a justice of the peace. The captives were declared fugitive slaves and ordered back to their former masters.

This story comes not from slaveholding America, but from the officially free soil of California. Contrary to popular myths about the American West as exempt from the struggles over slavery, the practice was widespread and rarely challenged. 

That history is now the subject of an exhibit at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, "California Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848–1865."

"By the letter of the law, yes, California was a free state," said Stacey L. Smith, author of "Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction." But a thorny question emerged after the state banned slavery in 1849, she added: "Did that mean that everybody who was enslaved and who was there already was automatically freed? The California Supreme Court eventually says no."

During the Gold Rush era — which kicked off this week in 1848 — more than a third of California’s American-born residents hailed from the proslavery South. Hundreds of these transplants brought slaves who became part of a patchwork of unfree labor systems common in California at the time — among them Native American servants, Chilean serfs, bound women, and indentured children.

California’s proslavery Democrats passed a fugitive slave law in 1852 that vitiated the state's constitutional prohibition against enslavement. It allowed whites to keep slaves they had already brought into California as long as they eventually transported them back to the South. The state thus treated escaped slaves as fugitives to be forcibly returned into bondage.

Antebellum slavery persisted on California soil — both formally and informally — into the 1860s before finally crumbling in the face of legal activism by free African-Americans and the growing power of antislavery Republicans.

Still, racism remained virulent. During the post-Civil War era, the same politicians who had challenged slavery embraced the anti-Chinese movement and passed some of the country’s most racially discriminatory laws.

The civil rights of nonwhites were so contentious that California failed to ratify the 14th and 15th Amendments — granting citizenship to former slaves and ensuring the rights of black men to vote — until the middle of the 20th century.  

The "California Bound" exhibit runs until April 28 and uses historical photos, documents, and ephemera to chronicle the human catastrophe of slavery in the Golden State. Tyree Boyd-Pates, a co-curator, said he hoped the materials would help people grapple with the reverberations of the state's racist legacy.

"This myth of California as a paradise doesn't allow us to hold ourselves accountable for the ways in which history has disenfranchised certain communities," he said. "So wanting to connect the past to the present, you can see that there's a larger trajectory of disenfranchisement that can’t be ignored."

As for the three black men who were ordered reenslaved by a California justice of the peace, they were said to have escaped on the journey back to Mississippi — disppearing without a trace.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the year that California banned slavery. It was 1849, not 1949.

An exhibit in Los Angeles surveys California’s role in perpetuating black enslavement.

California's black slaves and the myth of free soil

James Lick, once the wealthiest Californian, donated funds to build the world's most powerful telescope with the stipulation that it double as his tomb.

An austere Pennsylvania Dutchman, Lick made his fortune snatching up real estate in the small village of San Francisco just as the Gold Rush was taking off. 

He built the city's sumptuous Lick House, regarded as the finest hotel west of the Mississippi. He planted orchards in San Jose, built the largest flour mill in the state, and helped kick start the Ghirardelli chocolate empire. 

After suffering a stroke, the millionaire bachelor resolved to donate his entire fortune to the public good. His bequests included public baths, a home for aging widows, and a vocational school.

He was talked out of leaving money for a pyramid tomb in his own honor in downtown San Francisco. Instead, he donated $700,000 for what became Lick Observatory in the Diablo Range as a monument to both himself and the sciences. Completed in 1887, it was the world's first permanently occupied mountaintop observatory and brought discoveries including several exoplanets and moons around Jupiter.

It scans the skies to this day under the auspices of the University of California. A bronze plaque and silk flowers mark the place where Lick's bones were deposited beneath the great telescope, which, according to one tribute, "points to his home among the stars and brings it nearer to our gaze."

James Lick helped bring the heavens closer to California.