The Avenue of the Giants: Thirty-One Miles of Ancient Redwoods

1A road nobody needs anymore

The best thing about the Avenue of the Giants is that it is no longer important.

This was Highway 101. Everything traveling between San Francisco and Oregon came through here, which meant the road had to be widened, straightened and eventually replaced. The new freeway was built alongside it, and the old road was left in place with a new number and almost no traffic.

The result is thirty-one miles of two-lane road running through a grove of trees that were already old when Rome was a city. You can hear the freeway occasionally, a low sound through the trunks, and then it fades again. Most of the time you are driving at thirty miles an hour past trees that make your car look like a toy.

For most of its length the road runs beside the Eel River, and the two of them share the same narrow valley. That is not a coincidence. The biggest trees are down here on the level ground near the water, where the soil is deep and the river has been dropping silt on it for a very long time. Climb the slope on either side and the forest gets smaller almost immediately.

I want to be honest about what this trip was. I did not hike a long trail here. I drove the road, pulled over at the places that looked interesting, and walked into the trees for twenty minutes at a time. That is what most people do, and it turns out to be enough.

2The photographs do not work

I took a lot of pictures here and almost none of them say anything true. The problem is that a photograph has edges, and these trees do not fit inside them. Point the camera up and you lose the base. Step back far enough to include the whole tree and it becomes a thin line among other thin lines.

What a camera cannot record is the feeling of standing under a canopy three hundred feet above you. The light arrives already used, filtered through so many layers of branches that it comes down green and soft, and the temperature drops as soon as you leave the road. Sound behaves oddly too. Everything is quieter than it should be, because the deep layer of needles on the ground absorbs it.

The green light is also the reason the trees are here at all. This coast gets almost no rain in summer, and a tree this size moves an enormous amount of water. What saves them is fog. It rolls in off the Pacific at night, collects on the needles high in the canopy, and drips down onto the ground below. The trees can also take some of that moisture in directly through their leaves. In effect the forest waters itself out of the air during the months when it does not rain.

So the advice is simple, and I wish somebody had given it to me earlier: take three photographs, then put the camera away and stand still for five minutes. The awe is the part you take home, and it does not come through a lens.

3The bark is the strangest part

Everyone photographs the height. What surprised me was the surface. Coast redwood bark is thick, soft and fibrous — it hangs in long vertical strips and feels closer to rope than to wood. You can push a finger into it.

That softness is armor. The bark contains very little resin, so it does not burn easily, and on a big tree it can be a foot thick. When fire comes through the forest, and it does, the outside of the tree chars and the living part underneath survives.

You see the result everywhere along the Avenue. Many of the largest trees have a black cave burned into the base, sometimes deep enough to walk into, and the tree carried on growing around the wound as though nothing had happened. Ranchers used to shut poultry in them, which is why the old name for one is a goose pen.

The green carpet in that photograph is redwood sorrel. It looks like clover and it is one of the few plants that can live on this little light — so little that direct sun actually damages it, and it folds its leaves down within minutes to protect itself when a patch of sunlight moves across the floor.

The same chemistry keeps insects and fungus out. Redwood wood is full of tannin, the bitter compound that also gives it the red color in the name, and very little wants to eat it. A tree that resists fire, insects and rot at the same time can afford to take two thousand years over its life. That is the reason there are still ancient redwoods to look at, rather than only the memory of them.

4Roots that stay near the surface

Somewhere along the road you come to a tree that has fallen, and the root plate stands upright beside the trail like a wall. It is the first time the scale makes sense, because you are finally looking at something with a top and a bottom you can both see at once.

It also shows you the weakness. A tree three hundred feet tall has roots that go down perhaps ten or twelve feet. They are surprisingly shallow. What they do instead is spread outward, a hundred feet in every direction, and lock together with the roots of the trees around them. No redwood is standing on its own. The grove holds itself up collectively, which is why they grow so close together and why an isolated one is in trouble.

Founders Grove has the most famous example. The Dyerville Giant stood about 362 feet tall and was thought to be around 1,500 years old when another falling tree knocked it down in March 1991. People nearby reported hearing it, and thinking it was a train crash.

It still lies where it fell, and the trail simply runs along beside it. That is the picture above: not a row of logs but a single tree, root plate at one end and the trunk continuing past the edge of the frame. It will lie there for centuries yet.

5Nothing here is wasted

The floor of a redwood forest is not the empty brown carpet you might expect. Where a tree has come down and opened a hole in the canopy, the understory fills it immediately: ferns at knee height, broad soft leaves, young trees racing upward through the gap.

A fallen trunk takes centuries to decay, and while it does, it becomes the most valuable object in the forest. It holds water through the dry season. Seedlings root along the top of it, several in a line, and grow up using the dead tree as a platform. Walk through and you will see rows of young redwoods standing in a straight line for no visible reason. The reason is that a trunk lay there once and has since rotted away completely.

Redwoods also grow back from the base. When a tree falls or is cut, new stems rise in a ring around the old stump, all sharing one root system. Those rings are everywhere here, and some of them are enormous.

6Why any of it is still standing

It is worth knowing that this forest very nearly did not survive. Logging moved through this part of California quickly, and by the early twentieth century most of the coast redwood range had been cut. What is here now is here because a group of people bought it, grove by grove, and gave it away to be protected.

That is what the name Founders Grove refers to: the founders of the Save the Redwoods League, formed in 1918 for exactly this purpose. Along the Avenue you keep passing small signs naming a grove after a family or an individual. Each one is a piece of forest that somebody paid for so that it would not be cut down. The towering trees you stop to look at are, in a real sense, donated.

The tree they named for those founders stands at the start of the loop, and the sign in front of it is worth reading slowly. It is 346.1 feet tall. It measures 12.7 feet across and 40 feet around. The first branch is 190.4 feet above the ground — higher than most office buildings, on a trunk that carries no limbs at all below that point. Standing next to it, the number that lands hardest is the last one.

The largest single piece is the Rockefeller Forest, the biggest remaining old-growth coast redwood forest on earth, bought with money raised by the League and matched by John D. Rockefeller Jr. It is a short drive off the Avenue and it is the quietest place I have been in California.

What stayed with me is not the size of the trees. It is the ordinariness of the road. There is no gate, no ticket, no viewing platform. You drive an old highway at thirty miles an hour, you stop where you feel like stopping, and you walk into a forest that has been standing since before anyone wrote any of this down. Then you get back in the car and drive to the next one.