Redwood National Park

Stand still for a moment and listen. The sound up here is soft and close: water dripping from branches, the creak of wood far overhead, your own footsteps on a deep carpet of needles. The air is cool and damp. It smells of wet bark, moss, and earth. Look down at the trail. It gives a little under your boots, like a sponge. Now tilt your head back, slowly, and keep tilting. The trunks do not seem to end. They simply disappear into a green haze.

Welcome to Redwood National Park, on the far northern coast of California. The park reaches across Humboldt County and north into Del Norte County. It is unusual in one important way. It is managed as a partnership. The National Park Service and California State Parks work together here. Three older state parks sit inside the same protected landscape: Prairie Creek Redwoods, Del Norte Coast Redwoods, and Jedediah Smith Redwoods. Together, people call the whole area Redwood National and State Parks.

The trees around you are coast redwoods. Their scientific name is Sequoia sempervirens, which means roughly ever-living. They are the tallest trees on Earth. Many individual trees here rise taller than a thirty-storey building. Some are more than two thousand years old. That means a few of them were already growing when the Roman Empire was at its height. They live only in a narrow strip of coastline, from southern Oregon down through central California. This park holds some of the finest groves left anywhere.

Here is the first surprise. The tallest known living tree in the world stands somewhere inside this park. Researchers found it in 2006 and named it Hyperion. It measures roughly 115 metres, taller than the Statue of Liberty with its pedestal. But you will not see a sign pointing the way. Its exact location is not published. The area around it is closed to visitors, and rangers can fine people who go off trail to find it. Too many feet would crush the shallow roots and damage the ground the tree depends on.

That word, shallow, is the second surprise. A redwood this tall does not have a deep taproot. Its roots usually go down only a few metres. Instead, they spread wide, sometimes far beyond the reach of the branches. The roots of neighbouring trees grow into each other and lock together. So a grove stands up to coastal storms as a group, not as single trees. When you see redwoods growing in tight clusters or circles, you are often looking at one connected family.

Those circles have a story. When an old redwood falls or is cut, new shoots can sprout from its base and roots. Over time, they grow into a ring of young trees around the place where the parent stood. Locals often call these fairy rings. Look for gnarled, knobby lumps on some trunks, too. These are burls. They hold buds that can grow into new trees. A redwood does not need a seed to start again. It can rise from its own wood.

Now think about the weather. Summers on this coast are often grey. Thick fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean. That fog is not a nuisance for the forest. It is a lifeline. The tall crowns catch moisture from the fog, and it drips down to the ground below. In the dry months, this fog drip can supply a large share of the water the forest receives. The fog also cools the trees and slows the loss of water from their leaves.

Place your hand on the bark, gently. It is thick, fibrous, and reddish brown, which gives the tree its name. On old trees, the bark can be many centimetres deep. It holds a lot of water and chemicals called tannins. These make the wood resistant to fire, insects, and rot. You may see dark, blackened hollows in some trunks. These are old fire scars. The tree burned, survived, and kept growing around the wound.

This landscape was not empty before the parks. It is the ancestral homeland of Native peoples, including the Yurok, the Tolowa, and the Chilula. The Yurok built houses and canoes from redwood, especially from fallen trees. The Klamath River, which reaches the sea within the park, has long been central to Yurok life and salmon fishing. Tribal communities still live in this region today. They continue to care for the land, and they now play a role in restoration work here.

In the nineteenth century, after the California Gold Rush, the forests changed fast. Redwood timber was strong, light, and resisted decay. Logging companies cut huge areas along the coast. Most of the original old-growth redwood forest was eventually logged. Conservation groups, including Save the Redwoods League, which was founded in 1918, raised money to buy and protect groves. Those efforts helped create the state parks. Congress then established Redwood National Park in 1968 and expanded it in 1978.

The expansion did something unusual. It added land that had already been logged. So part of this park is a long experiment in healing. Crews have removed old logging roads and replanted slopes to reduce erosion into the streams. The world has noticed. The parks were named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, a list of places judged to be of value to all humanity. When you drive through younger, thinner stands of trees here, you are seeing that recovery in progress.

The forest is not the only thing to watch for. In Prairie Creek, large herds of Roosevelt elk often graze in open meadows. Keep a long distance from them, especially in autumn, when the males are restless. On the damp trail, look for bright yellow banana slugs moving slowly across the needles. Along the coast, you may find Fern Canyon, where walls of ferns cover the steep sides of a narrow creek. It appeared in the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and it looks prehistoric in person.

Before you move on, stand still once more. Notice how the light reaches you. It does not fall straight down. It comes in thin, slanted beams, filtered through branches far above. Notice the silence between the drips. Every tree around you started from something very small, and many have stood here for centuries. As you walk back along the trail, step softly. Stay on the path. You are walking across a root system that holds this whole forest together.