Redwoods

The camera stands on a narrow dirt trail with a redwood immediately beside it, close enough that the trunk fills a quarter of the view from the ground up and keeps going past the top of the frame. There is no angle from which you can see both the base and the crown of one of these, and the panorama does not solve that - it just makes the failure obvious, which is closer to the real experience than any photograph. The bark is deeply fluted and fibrous, red-brown, and soft enough to press. Around it the forest is spaced rather than crowded: other trunks standing well apart, all going straight up, with no branches at all for the first several storeys. The floor is a continuous carpet of redwood sorrel with sword ferns in the wetter dips, and the light coming through is green and even, with a few white gaps where the canopy has broken.

The sequoia tree is the tallest known tree. The massive height of dense groves creates an other-worldly environment below, shaded most of the time, with sound muffled by carpets of needles, and interspersed with lush groups of ferns and velvety green moss and lichen. There is an abundance of wildlife here, including Coho and Chinook salmon, one of the favorite foods for another resident - the black bear. There are bald eagles and spotted owls, bobcats and foxes, elk and mule deer.

Many of the parks and forests containing these giant trees are accessible by vehicles and on easy loop foot trails. There are even three trees that are privately owned and have roads running right through them (fee charged). One of these trees, the Shrine Drive-Thru Tree near Humboldt Redwoods State Park, has a gift shop, picnic area, and a two-story tree house for the children.

The parks are large and include a variety of ecosystems from coastal water with seal colonies to alpine meadows. There is a great deal of back-country area here for campers and hikers, and plenty of groomed trails. Hiking and camping are two of the most popular things to do in the redwoods national and state parks and forests.

Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park The beautiful Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park is the most undeveloped and pristine of all the parks containing old growth redwoods and sequoias. This has both positive and negative impact on those wishing to explore. There are no trails at all in most of the park, which protects the undisclosed location of the Grove of Titans, containing the ten tallest trees in the world. It is located in the far northern part of California near the town of Crescent City and the Oregon border.