ARNOLD, Calif. — Joyce Brown was 12 when her parents first took her to visit the "drive-thru tree," a giant sequoia in California famous for a car-sized hole carved into the base of its trunk.
Brown thought she had entered a land of giants as she walked underneath and around the ancient 100-foot-tall tree, which was toppled by a massive storm on Sunday.
"It's kind of like someone in the family has died," said Brown, a 65-year-old retired middle school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area who spends about a third of the year at her family's cabin in Arnold, about 4 miles from where the now-fallen tree lies dead in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
Four generations of Brown's family have spent countless hours at the tree and often took out-of-town visitors there, some from as far away as Turkey.
In May 2015, she and her husband showed off the tree to John and Lesley Ripper, a Michigan couple the Browns befriended on an African safari.
"I was blown away," said John Ripper, a 55-year-old printer in Northville, Michigan. "I've traveled to 70 countries. But that particular tree and being able to walk underneath it and touch it was quite a memorable moment and something I won't soon forget."
Ripper said he can't believe that a storm felled such a massive, sturdy-looking tree.
"In the blink of an eye, it's gone," he said. "There's this giant tree everyone remembers, and it's going to be laying there in plain sight. The dead giant."
