40 miles N of Eureka; 336 miles N of San Francisco
It's difficult to explain the feeling you get in the old-growth forests of Redwood National and State Parks without citing Alice in Wonderland. Like a jungle, the redwood forest is a multistoried affair, and the tall trees are just the top layer. Everything seems big and misty, from another era -- flowering bushes cover the ground, 10-foot-tall ferns line the creeks, and the smells are rich and musty. It's so outsize and primeval, you half expect to turn the corner and see a dinosaur.
When Archibald Menzies first noted the botanical existence of the coast redwood in 1794, more than 2 million acres of redwood forest carpeted California and Oregon. By 1965, heavy logging had reduced that to 300,000 acres, and it was obvious something had to be done if any were to survive. The state created several parks around individual groves in the 1920s, and in 1968 the federal government created Redwood National Park. In May 1994, the National Park Service and the California Department of Parks and Recreation signed an agreement to manage these conservation areas cooperatively.
Although logging of old-growth redwoods in the region is still a major bone of contention among the government, private landowners, and environmentalists, it's auspicious that contention even exists -- a sign that perhaps we have all learned to see the forest and the trees for what they are: the monarchs of all living things, a link to the age of the dinosaurs, and a humble reminder that mankind is but a hiccup in time compared to the venerable Sequoia sempervirens.
