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, 30-meter-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, 6.5 kilometers from where the now-fallen tree lies dead in Calaveras Big Trees State Park.