Today we head up the road to another national park in northern California, one created to preserve rare native forests of coast redwoods. In one of his more famous media missteps as governor of California, Ronald Reagan was widely reported as having cut redwood trees with the old saw, “If you've seen one, you've seen them all.” Tree people were outraged. But Reagan was misquoted. What he actually said, during a long, tiring press tour, was, “A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?”
The tree in question was Sequoia sempervirens, or coast redwood, the world’s tallest tree. Old-growth coast redwoods can grow taller than a 35-story skyscraper, huge in circumference too. Most live to at least 600; old-timers reach 2,000 years of age or more. Ancient ancestors, deciduous Metasequoia or dawn redwoods, covered the Northern Hemisphere 160 million years ago, part of the scenery when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Isolated from the rest of their kind by thick ice sheets a million years ago, dawn redwoods along the West Coast evolved into the evergreen trees we know today.
Appreciating life in these magical forests is the main thing to do in Redwood National and State Parks.
Coast redwoods survive on only four percent of their historic range. Almost half of remaining old-growth forest is protected in remote Redwood National and State Parks. Which is why you should go. Some of the lush terrain in this, California’s finest tree hugging temple, is so strange that, in Return of the Jedi, George Lucas convinced most of the world it was extraterrestrial.
More than 1,000 species of plants and animals inhabit this wildly unusual world, including Roosevelt elk, or wapiti, which survive just here and a few other places. But they don’t call this redwood country for nothing. Coast redwoods are the big show. They thrive only here, in these protected coastal lowlands. Shallow-rooted and vulnerable to wind and soil erosion, redwoods tend to topple during severe storms. They don’t need taproots because rain here is quite heavy for three seasons. During dry summers fog provides the equivalent of about 50 inches of rain, moisture that collects on needle-like leaves, drips down tree trunks or directly onto the ground, and is then absorbed by hundreds of square feet of surface roots.
These trees are the ultimate survivors—which is why they’re named sempervirens, in Latin “ever-living.” They grow from seed as tiny as a tomato’s, yet they also regenerate—clone themselves, essentially. When an elder falls, new trees shoot up from stumps or from roots around its base, forming gigantic woodland “fairy rings.” Each of these trees, when mature, can generate more genetically identical offspring. Sometimes a large limb from a fallen tree will sprout all along its length, sending up an orchard-straight row of trees.
Appreciating life in these magical forests is the main thing to do in Redwood National and State Parks. Take time to simply be here, whether you fish, cycle, hike and backpack—there are more than 200 miles of trails—or take a ranger-guided kayak trip on the Smith River, California’s last wild river. There are nice drives too, such as Howland Hill Road through some of the finest trees in Jedediah Smith Redwoods. Something for everyone, such as the Revelation Trail at Prairie Creek Redwoods—a short, self-guided nature trail for the blind and sighted alike, with rope and wooden handrails the entire length and “touchable” sights. Not to mention Trees of Mystery in Klamath, and the Tour-Thru Tree just south. So many more trees to look at.
Kim Weir is founder and editor of Up the Road, a nonprofit public-interest journalism project dedicated to sustaining the Northern California story. Weir is also a long-time member of the Society of American Travel Writers, and a former NSPR reporter.