At the start of the tour
Welcome to Redwood National Park and the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway
Welcome to Redwood National and State Parks, home of the tallest trees on Earth. It's really four parks: one national park and three California state parks. Since 1994 the National Park Service and California State Parks have run them together, and between them they protect about forty-five percent of all the old-growth redwood forest left in the world.
This is the homeland of Native people, including people of Yurok, Tolowa and Chilula descent, who have lived here since time immemorial. The parks plan and review their work with these tribal partners.
Here's the plan. We start here by the ocean, at the park's southern visitor center, and head north to a meadow where elk often graze. Then we leave the highway for the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway, ten miles of road through ancient redwoods in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, and we finish at a short trail near its north end.
I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can just look up.
Point 1 · At the stop
Kuchel Visitor Center
This is the park's southern visitor center, right on the beach just south of Orick. It's one of five visitor centers in the parks. Inside you can pick up a map, a Junior Ranger book or a passport stamp, and ask the staff what's open today.
The ground under this building has a history. In the 1960s, a lumber mill stood here on the beach. Today it's the front door of a national park. That's the story of this whole coast in one spot: a forest that was cut for more than a century, and then, with a long fight, set aside.
Just north of here, Redwood Creek reaches the sea. In the dry months, a sand bar can close its mouth. When the winter rains come, the creek breaks through the bar, and Chinook salmon begin their run upstream.
If you walk down to the water, keep your eyes on the ocean. Sneaker waves and rip currents are real on this coast. And if you ever feel an earthquake near the shore, think tsunami, and get to high ground or inland right away.
History, on the way there
On the way: Elk Meadow
Next, we're heading to Elk Meadow, and with a little luck, the animals it's named for.
The elk here are Roosevelt elk, the largest kind of elk in North America. And yes, they're named for a president, Theodore Roosevelt. A big bull can top a thousand pounds, with antlers that he sheds and grows again every single year.
They came close to disappearing. Elk once numbered an estimated ten million across North America. By 1907, fewer than a hundred thousand were left. That collapse helped start a wave of conservation, and one result was the state park this tour heads into. Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park was created in part to save one of the last wild herds of these elk in California, along with the old-growth forest they live beside.
Today seven herds live in these parks. Elk prefer the edge of the forest, with open grass to graze and the trees close by for shelter. Cows and their young move together in loose herds. The bulls keep to themselves, or travel in small bachelor groups, until late summer and fall. That's the rut, when they bugle, a strange sound that's part roar and part whistle, and lock antlers over the cows. Calves are born in spring, spotted, and spend their first few weeks hiding before they join the herd.
Point 2 · At the stop
Elk Meadow
This is Elk Meadow. Look out across the open grass. Roosevelt elk are often seen here, though never guaranteed. If they're close, give them room: stay back at least seventy-five feet. The bulls can be aggressive in the fall rut, and so can the cows when they're protecting their young in spring.
This peaceful place used to be an industrial one. The Davison Trail that starts here follows an old logging road that once led to a lumber mill and a log deck. The National Park Service bought the land in 1996 and set out to restore it. Wetlands, hills and streams are slowly coming back. Along the trail, people watch for spawning salmon, stalking herons and migrating songbirds.
This is also where the Trillium Falls Trail begins. A short walk in is the falls itself, a ten-foot cascade over deep green, moss-covered rocks, under big-leaf maples. In spring, white trilliums bloom along the creek.
A mill yard where elk now graze. It's a good place to remember that a forest can come back, given time.
History, on the way there
On the way: Prairie Creek Visitor Center and Elk Prairie
Next, we're heading to the Prairie Creek Visitor Center and Elk Prairie, in the heart of the state park.
By the 1910s, people could see that the last big stands of old-growth redwoods were about to be cut. In 1918, a group of scientists founded the Save the Redwoods League, a nonprofit with a simple plan: raise money and buy the forest. The State of California matched the League's funds, and between 1920 and 1960, the partnership set aside more than a hundred thousand acres of redwoods.
Prairie Creek began with one gift. In the summer of 1923, a widow named Zipporah Russ gave the state a hundred-and-sixty-acre grove along Prairie Creek and the highway, as a memorial to her husband and to the pioneers of Humboldt County. The League kept buying land around it, and the park grew to about fourteen thousand acres.
In the 1930s, a company of the Civilian Conservation Corps moved in, nearly two hundred young men living in a camp on the prairie. They built campsites, picnic tables and a campfire circle, and, most notably, the building you're about to see.
Point 3 · At the stop
Prairie Creek Visitor Center and Elk Prairie
This is the Prairie Creek Visitor Center. The rustic building was put up in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Company 1903. It was built from natural materials salvaged from an earlier cleanup of the prairie, in the back-to-nature style the parks favored in those years. It's a significant example of their craftsmanship in California's state parks.
Beside the visitor center is Elk Prairie, about a hundred and twenty acres of open grass ringed by old-growth redwoods. It lies within Yurok ancestral territory. Over time, the prairie may have been widened by people, through burning, grazing and some tree cutting. Today State Parks burns it from time to time, to bring back the native plants.
In 1881 a homesteading family settled the prairie, and another family took it over in 1905. On its northeastern edge their 1924 bungalow still stands, next to an orchard with fruit trees more than a hundred years old.
The prairie and the forest around it are among the most heavily used elk areas in the parks, so look for them here too. Near the visitor center, the short Revelation Trail was made for visitors who are blind or have low vision. It invites you to touch the bark, smell the California bay and listen to the creek.
History, on the way there
On the way: Big Tree Wayside
Next, we're heading to Big Tree Wayside, and the road you're on is named for the man most responsible for saving this forest.
Newton B. Drury was born in San Francisco in 1889. For about twenty years he ran the Save the Redwoods League. Then, from 1940 to 1951, he was Director of the National Park Service. He went on to run California's state parks, and then returned to the League. He's the only person to have led both the League and the National Park Service, and his work helped protect a hundred and thirty-five thousand acres of redwoods, more than half of what remains today.
Point 4 · At the stop
Big Tree Wayside
This is Big Tree Wayside. From here it's a two-minute walk, about seventy-five yards on a wheelchair-accessible path, to the Big Tree itself. It's estimated to be more than fifteen hundred years old. There's a viewing platform, and around it, plenty of trees just as impressive.
At the trailhead, listen for the audio boxes. They carry the voices of Yurok elders, talking about the redwoods and the people who have lived among them since time immemorial.
All of this started small. A coast redwood grows from a seed no bigger than a tomato seed. It can reach well over three hundred feet, yet it has no taproot. Its roots go down only ten to thirteen feet, then spread sixty to eighty feet sideways. Thick bark full of tannin protects it from insects and from all but the hottest fires.
The Circle Trail, the Foothill Trail and the Cathedral Trees Trail all start here. The cathedral trees are family groups of redwoods. Fifteen centuries is a long time to stand in one place. These trees are good at it.
History, on the way there
On the way: Ah-Pah Interpretive Trail
Next, we're heading to the Ah-Pah Interpretive Trail, near the north end of the parkway. It's a trail about healing, so here's what needed healing.
It could take a hand crew weeks to fell and haul a single redwood. Then came chainsaws and bulldozers in the 1930s, and acres of ancient forest could be cut in days. After World War Two, a housing boom brought clear-cutting on a vast scale. By the 1960s, industrial logging had removed almost ninety percent of the original redwoods.
On October 2, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed the act that created Redwood National Park. But the new park didn't protect whole watersheds, and clear-cutting on the hills around it went on for another ten years. The sediment in Redwood Creek rose dramatically. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed an addition of forty-eight thousand acres. Thirty-nine thousand of them had already been logged.
So the parks inherited hundreds of miles of logging roads, many of them failing, and a source of mud in the streams. In 2018 the Park Service, California State Parks and the Save the Redwoods League launched Redwoods Rising, a restoration effort expected to take more than thirty years. Its goals include removing three hundred miles of abandoned and failing roads, and restoring more than seventy thousand acres of younger, second-growth forest.
Point 5 · At the stop
Ah-Pah Interpretive Trail
This is the Ah-Pah Interpretive Trail. It's only about a third of a mile long, and it used to be a logging road.
Crews took the road apart, reshaped the hillside back toward its natural contours, and let the forest grow over it. Exhibits along the trail show what this ground looked like before the slopes were reshaped and replanted, and you can see what it looks like now. You can walk the whole thing in a few minutes, and it's a good one for young children, who may never guess there was a road here at all.
This is what the parks mean when they call themselves a testing ground for large-scale forest and stream restoration. The old-growth groves you passed today were saved by buying them. The rest of the forest is being saved by patience: removing roads, keeping mud out of salmon streams, and giving young redwoods the centuries they need.
That's the end of our tour. Some of the trees you passed were already many centuries old before the first road came through, and with a little help, they'll still be here long after it's gone. Thank you for riding with me today, along the old highway, through some of the last ancient redwood forest on Earth.