Giant Sequoia National Monument spans 328,315 acres in the southern Sierra Nevada of eastern central California and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service within Sequoia National Forest. Created in 2000, it protects 38 of that forest’s 39 giant sequoia groves, about half of those still surviving, in northern and southern units near Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks. The monument also encompasses Native homelands, especially those of the Western Mono, whose descendants still help tend this landscape. Its management has been heavily contested in court, yet it remains a major refuge for giant sequoias and a broader protected Sierra Nevada landscape, where gray wolves returned in 2023.