Redwood National Park United States

Legendary

Take in the beauty of the towering redwood trees that live for over 1000 years and soar to over 300 feet tall.

Photo by Redwood National and State Parks

Somewhere in this park stands the tallest living thing on Earth, and rangers won't tell you where. It's a coast redwood named Hyperion, discovered in 2006, and it rises about 116 meters, taller than the Statue of Liberty including its base.

The area around it is closed. Too many people trampled the forest floor trying to find it, so anyone caught nearby now faces a fine.

Coast redwoods grow only along a narrow strip of the Pacific coast from southern Oregon to central California. Fog rolling in off the ocean keeps them watered through the dry summers.

They can live more than 2,000 years. Their thick, spongy bark shrugs off fire and insects, and even a felled redwood will send up new sprouts from its stump.

The Yurok, Tolowa, and other peoples lived among these trees for thousands of years, building houses and canoes from fallen wood. In 1850, about two million acres of old-growth redwood forest still stood.

Then gold was found in the Trinity River that same year. Thousands of miners poured in, and most found nothing.

What they did find was lumber. San Francisco and other cities were growing fast and needed strong wood that wouldn't rot, so failed miners became loggers.

Entire hillsides came down. By 1910, the two million acres had shrunk to a few hundred thousand.

A group called the Save the Redwoods League formed in 1918 and started buying groves to protect them. California turned those groves into state parks, but the logging kept going, and it sped up after World War II.

By the time Congress finally created Redwood National Park on October 2, 1968, about 90 percent of the original old-growth forest was gone.

The national park and three state parks were combined in 1994 and run together, something no other national park does. UNESCO made the whole area a World Heritage Site in 1980.

Walk the Lady Bird Johnson Grove loop, an easy trail through giants named for the First Lady who helped dedicate the park. Drive the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway and stop to watch Roosevelt elk graze in the meadows. Look for Fern Canyon, where walls 15 meters high drip with ferns, and check whether the seasonal road is open before you go.