Imagine an environment in the Western US that is climatic opposite the Southwest high desert. Imagine a place where every micron of soil has a green plant growing on it and plants grow off other plants while trees get 370 feet tall reaching the sun that shines off the nearby ocean. Once in a while we need a change of scene so Rocky Mountain Beer Explorer sent our reporters to Redwood National Park in far northern California to drink beer among some of the tallest trees on earth. This is a mind blowing place, that relatively few people visit.
We chose Redwood National Park because so few of the people we know in New Mexico have been there. When we returned and told people where we’d been, most told us they had heard of it but had no plans to go there. We grew animated urging them to go. It is an unusual park in a remote part of the West, far from any city, far from any major highway. In fact to get to Redwood, you have to drive windy, remote roads from small towns in remote areas best known for marijuana growing. Once yet get to the park, you find yourself buried in deep jungle – an alien land of incredible silence and overwhelming life.
We flew to Arcata, California, a quaint little town next to Humboldt Bay with an airport the size of Santa Fe’s but more modern and spacious. Arcata is home to Humboldt State University (named for the great naturalist Alexander Von Humboldt), famous for its forestry school and its distance from the cities in California. The town even has a plaza sort of like Santa Fe’s but lacking significant historic sites like the Palace of the Governors.
Redwood National Park, like the Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico, is protected by the National Park Service for of its natural qualities alone. The park is celebrating fifty years since the park was born in response to profound conflict and destruction in northern California as the forests were ravaged by logging companies.
Redwood forests are a rare ecotype. When Europeans first came to the West Coast, these giant trees grew along the Coast Range’s west face from the Oregon border to the southern reaches of Big Sur, covering 2 million acres of land. The trees are gigantic, growing to 380 feet tall and sometimes with a diameter of 22 feet. Only their cousins, the Giant Sequoia of the Sierra Nevada grow bigger and older, but not taller. Redwoods are the tallest trees on earth by far.
These trees are so big that anyone who meets one is stunned to silence. They are giant columns of great beauty that rise up into the fog, their huge trunks filling the forest among streams and ferns, mosses and berry bushes. Many of the trees are massive but once in a while you come across one that is particularly large and you feel you could spend all day trying desperately to grasp its size and its significance. Meeting these trees changes a sensitive and perceptive person forever.
Even so people love to make lumber out of them and from the 1900s up until the 1960s there was a mad rush to cut all of them down to make lawn furniture and lumber to rebuild San Francisco after the huge earthquake and fire of 1906 and for lumber generally after that. Redwood rots very slowly. As with the old growth forests of Oregon and Washington, the timber industry felt it was okay to cut all of the giants down until a major movement of people demanded that some of the Redwoods be protected.
In the Redwood country the timber industry was completely denuding the landscape, cutting down all the trees and filling the creeks with mud and garbage. The salmon and steelhead runs that depend on these streams were destroyed. With all the vegetation gone after logging, the hillsides washed into the streams and mud flowed out into the nearby ocean, covering the intertidal with muck and killing off marine life. This was all fine with the timber industry that fought any effort to protect redwood forests.
Fortunately for everyone, especially the fish and the trees, a movement to protect the redwoods sprouted in 1910 when the Save the Redwoods League started to buy up redwood forest and the State of California matched their efforts. By the 1920s the first state parks were established to protect redwoods and make them accessible to the public. But logging continued at a frenzied pace outside the protected lands. So too did the efforts of the Save the Redwoods League which has purchased 200,000 acres of redwood forest, much of it old growth. They continue their work today.
With the environmental revolution of the 1960s came a push for the federal government to protect redwoods and after a fierce battle with the timber industry, Redwood National Park was established in 1968 to protect a 58,000 acres of a watershed called Redwood Creek containing both logged land and huge stands of old growth redwoods. Then in 1977 the great Congressman Phillip Burton advanced legislation to expand Redwood National Park by another 48,000 acres and the bill was signed by President Carter.
The National Park Service manages Redwood Creek but the California State Parks manages several significant old growth parks nearby including Prairie Creek Redwoods SP, Del Norte Coast Redwoods SP, and Jedediah Smith Redwoods SP, all of which harbor huge trees.
Redwood National Park is fascinating for two reasons beyond the mind boggling beauty and significance of the natural environment. Here the National Park Service is engaged in major land rehabilitation efforts within the national park. They use heavy machinery to heal the land that was ravaged by the loggers, restoring streams, replanting redwoods and associated plants, and removed roads. In this climate trees grow rapidly and already these rehabilitated lands are covered with dense forest though it will be centuries until the trees become giants.
The California State Parks fully cooperate with the National Park Service at Redwood for all aspects of land and people management. The visitor centers all have both the state park and National Park Service logos on them and rangers from both agencies patrol the parks. It is a wonderful cooperative venture between two world class park services to protect an internationally important place and its species.
And the redwood parks are not just giant forest but also hold Sitka spruce forests and the broad wild beaches pounded by waves from the open Pacific on the fringe of the continent. Here you have a world of gray whales and big trees, silence and the roar of the ocean, storms and the quiet of fog dripping off the fronds of the trees to the mosses and ferns waiting below. Here the sporophytes (plants that reproduce with spores rather than seeds) thrive.
Hiking
Our editorial desk sent our reporters out to do long hikes in the redwoods with beers in their backpacks. We walked from Prairie Creek to Fern Canyon though miles of giant trees. We emerged onto Gold Bluff Beach where the waves roared. Then back to Prairie Creek along Miner’s Ridge getting back to our car in the failing light of late evening. Another hike took us into Redwood National Park proper to the Tall Trees Grove where huge trees grow on a flat along Redwood Creek deep in the park. Another day we hiked Hope Creek into steep ridges and down through Sitka spruce forests above the wild coastal plain that was flooded with the water of swollen creeks.
These walks fill you with deep reverence and awe. It’s the sort of feeling one has at the Grand Canyon or in the Giant Sequoias. The misty forest is heavy with time. Not only do you feel the life of these 2000 year old trees, you sense the hundreds of generations of their ancestors who lived on this land long before people walked in these woods. You can sense the evolution of the land and the ferns that began their evolution around 400 million years ago, long before mammals existed. Redwoods and other conifers began their rise through adaptation and evolution around 300 million years ago, before the age of the dinosaurs, before the first flowering plants. Redwoods evolved to take advantage of coastal fog and the mild climate.
Redwood is a place of life and ancient time. The plants have deep roots in the distant past. These trees persist in peace and perseverance and hopefully will survive after humanity is gone. We can all be grateful for the generations of people who protected this island from industrial mayhem. I hope we can all help continue the expansion of redwood protection and do our parts to stave off climate change which threatens these forests today.
I was born and grew up in NM, and after also living in UT and WA, I moved to BC, Canada. BC is clear cutting their forests like crazy. The destruction is beyond belief, and there is little being done to stop it.