National Park of Redwood

Location: California
Established: October 2, 1968
Size: 131,983 acres (53,412 hectares)

Sometimes, when the morning fog caresses the great trees, you can imagine the past flowing through the long, misty shadows … Vast redwood forests flourishing across a lush and humid North America … After the final ice age, a last stand here in the sustaining climate along the Pacific coast … Tree after tree falling to the loggers. Then, in a windswept moment, the past vanishes and you stand beside other visitors, gazing up at the Earth's tallest living things. That is the essence of Redwood National and State Parks.

The park, near the northern limit of the coast redwood's narrow range, preserves the remnants of a forest that once covered two million acres (809,371 hectares) and, at the turn of the 20th century, was badly threatened by logging. The state of California and the Save-the-Redwoods League came to the rescue by acquiring hundreds of groves and protecting them within 26 state parks. Three redwood state parks—Jedediah Smith, Del Norte Coast, and Prairie Creek—were encompassed by the national park when it was created in 1968.

Logging on surrounding private land, however, threatened the parks' protected redwoods. Soil and sediments from the logged-over tracts washed into the rivers and creeks, settling to the bottom downstream. Silt deposits can smother redwoods—for the giants are amazingly vulnerable. And the waterlogged soil weakens the trees' resistance to wind. Their roots are shallow, often only ten feet (three meters) deep.

In 1978 Congress added 48,000 acres (19,425 hectares) to the national park's 58,000 acres (23,472 hectares), including about 36,000 (14,567 hectares) that had been logged. The raw, clear-cut land, a park official wrote, had "the look of an active war zone." Today, in an epic earth-moving project—a redwood renaissance—crews are beginning to reclaim vast stretches of logged-over lands. Hillsides, carved away for logging roads, are being restored. Most of the 400 miles (644 kilometers) of roads are being erased. It will take at least 50 years for the scars of logging to disappear and another 250 or so years for the replanted redwood seedlings to grow to modest size.

The renaissance has added a new dimension to the traditional rite of staring up at redwoods. Today's visitor can look at hillsides shorn of giants and know that generations from now the trees will grow there again.