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.

Four generations of Brown's family spent countless hours at the tree and often took out-of-town visitors there, some from as far away as Turkey.

The drive-thru tree had a diameter of almost 7 meters and was about 2,000 years old, said Tony Tealdi, a supervising ranger at California State Parks.

The tunnel that made the tree famous - and ultimately weakened it-was carved into its trunk in the 1880s to allow tourists to pass through, first with horses and buggies and later with cars. The tunnel was limited to pedestrians in recent decades.

Sumner Crawford, 36, of Charleston, South Carolina, remembers every detail of his first visit to the tree as a kid in the early 1990s.

"I remember I was walking through the tree and thinking, 'I'm inside of the tree right now!'" he said. "It was madness."