Combined State and National Parks Preserve a Magnificent Remnant
For many years, the designated tallest redwood tree in the world was located along Prairie Creek on the eastern side of what is now Redwood National Park. Discovered in 1962 by a National Geographic explorer, the tree soared a bit over 367.8 feet (equivalent to a 36-story apartment building).
Depending on your point of view, it was either fortunate or a horror that the tallest tree was located across the creek from a zone of total destruction, a ravaged area of stumps, splinters, debris and bulldozed gashes that had been left by loggers practicing the locust theory of lumbering called clear cutting.
Either way, the contrast between a pristine redwood forest and a “harvested” one was so dramatic that the tallest tree’s discovery added much haste and determination to a decades-long attempt to create a Redwood National Park. People’s disgust with the frantic destruction of the remnant virgin redwood forest gave Congress the incentive to create the park in 1968.
What Has Been Lost
In many ways, it was just in time. Virgin redwood forests originally covered 3,000 square miles of land, extending along a 500-mile range, starting in the Big Sur country south of Monterey and reaching north to just beyond the Oregon border. Because the trees have always depended on the summer fogs that are a staple of the West Coast's climate, significant groves were rarely found more than 10 or 15 miles inland.
The rise of San Francisco and its fierce need for housing and commercial buildings fueled the exploitation of the redwoods, beginning with extensive forests around San Francisco Bay itself in the 1840s and 50s, and then later extending up and down the coast. There, loggers would fell and then slide seaside trees down to small harbors. The wood they sought was probably the best construction timber ever harvested by Americans. Redwood is a strong, straight-grained, insect and rot-resistant wood that is very slow to burn. Unlike most conifer forests, which can be devastated by a wildfire, redwood forests remain remarkably intact even after the hottest fires.
As technology progressed, loggers began reaching the inner fastnesses of California’s rugged coast ranges where the greatest redwood groves, situated along river bottomlands, presented a seemingly endless store of great trees – tens of thousands of them more than 250 feet tall, and often 12, 15 or even 20 feet wide at the base. The industry settled into its glory period, a 60-year run that reduced the original 3,000 square miles of virgin woods to remnants and memories.
At the same time, California’s growing conservation movement realized that the number of redwoods was not infinite and that the specie’s superlative groves were being cut with no thought of setting any significant number aside to show posterity their glory. Just after the turn of the century, the Save the Redwoods League and the Sempervirens Fund began a movement to purchase prime redwood groves and dedicate them as untouchable preserves. Their first big acquisition was Big Basin in the Santa Cruz Mountains southwest of San Jose, an old-growth grove that soon became the heart of California’s first state park.
By the 1960s, the loggers’ idyll was over. They could see the end of their spree occurring sometime in the 1990s, when the last of the virgin groves would be gone. Fortunately, attempts by preservationists to acquire prime redwood groves over the years had resulted in the successful set-aside of 75,000 acres (about 117 square miles) of redwood forest – 4% of the original virgin canopy.
The Feds Step in It
That was the scene the federal government stepped into when it created Redwood National Park in 1968. The feds, entering the middle of great debates between loggers and conservationists, locals and outsiders, accountants and aesthetes, created a patchwork park that pleased nobody, but at least expanded the size of the remnant that would be saved. To the 34,000 acres already preserved by three California state parks (Prairie Creek, Del Norte Coast and Jedediah Smith), they added an additional 71,000, most of that acreage in prime groves, but other parts of it in marginal or even cut-over lands.
The federal acreage joined and buffered the three state parks, forming a 45-mile long, 163-square-mile park along the coasts of Humboldt and Del Norte counties. The park contains 45% of all the old-growth redwoods left in California. (There are a few redwood groves in the extreme south of Oregon.)
The main body of the park is at Prairie Creek to the south, with its cushion of federal lands extending inland. Prairie Creek is noted for its excellent coastal access, which can often take visitors through thriving herds of Roosevelt elk, a species that was almost extinct in California until a spectacularly successful attempt to reintroduce them to their ancient coastal haunts began in the 1980s.
South of Prairie Creek is Lady Bird Johnson Grove, a rhododendron-festooned, hillside redwood forest of sometimes unearthly beauty. On a sunny day, runners of fog may suddenly swoop in from the Pacific, turning the grove into nature’s version of a Star Wars light saber duel, where constantly shifting shafts of sunlight compete with thickets of fog. You can stand surrounded by billows of mist and shadowy redwoods and see out to patches of brilliantly lit trees, then suddenly find your condition reversed as sunlight smacks your face and the fog withdraws. The contrast is exhilarating.
The highway north from Prairie Creek runs through Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park, possibly the finest two-lane blacktop drive through redwoods in California. The road rises and dips through a climax forest. The trees here, thousands of them more than 250 feet tall, stand quietly at respectful distances from one another, like mighty supporting columns in a colossal hall. Their deeply fluted bark varies from a deep cinnamon red to an almost slate gray. On many older trees, averaging 700 to 1,000 years old, the first branches do not appear until 100 or 120 feet up the trunk. The often surprisingly tidy floor of the forest is a patchwork of ferns, laurel trees and occasional rhododendrons.
Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, its northern boundary formed by the Smith River, is the best place north of Humboldt Redwoods State Park to experience the feel of an old-growth forest alongside a sizeable river. When the current is running low, you can walk out to the middle of the Smith and turn back to see a solid wall of trees that you have to keep reminding yourself are the height of 25 and 30-story apartment buildings.
The well-_maintained gravel road through Jedediah Smith, which begs for slow cruising, offers probably the finest “near off-road” drive to be had in a redwood forest. Thousands of great trees have been saved here, each one a subtle variation on the basic themes of cinnamon and gray, fluted trunks and wide boles, sheer tallness and pure proportion. Your mind alternates between joy that these great plants can now abide untouched and near despair at the thought of how many millions like them have become lawn furniture and siding.
Unlike most of the U.S., California’s north coast is not toasty warm in summer. Instead, the season brings cool temperatures and heavy fog. The best times to see Redwood National Park are in May, September and October, when temperatures are warm and skies are generally clear
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