Redwood National Park — California

Cathedral groves of the tallest trees on earth, rooted in the fog and drizzle of California's far north coast. Beneath them the world goes quiet and green and impossibly old. You walk in feeling ordinary and come out changed.

I have stood beneath a lot of trees in my life, but nothing prepared me for the first coast redwood that stopped me dead. Lia and I had walked into Lady Bird Johnson Grove in a soft grey fog, and I looked up, and up, and kept looking, and the trunk simply vanished into the mist before it ever reached a crown. Some of these trees were seedlings when Rome was young. They are the tallest living things on the planet, taller than a thirty-storey building, and standing at the foot of one you feel time itself stretch out around you until your own life seems like a single indrawn breath.

The Groves

The great redwood groves are best walked slowly, in silence, ideally in fog. In Prairie Creek’s Founders Grove and along the Stout Grove trails we wandered footpaths carpeted in redwood sorrel and ferns, the light filtering down thick and green and underwater-soft. Everything is oversized here — ferns as tall as Lia, fallen trunks you climb over like small hills, root balls the size of houses where a giant has finally toppled. The fog drips steadily from the canopy far above, a sound like faint rain that never quite falls. We spoke in whispers without deciding to. The grove asks it of you.

Footpath winding through towering redwoods and ferns in a misty grove

Fern Canyon and the Creeks

Not far from the biggest trees, a small creek has carved something out of a fairy tale: Fern Canyon, a narrow gorge whose vertical walls run fifty feet high and are draped, top to bottom, in a solid tapestry of living ferns. We picked our way up the creek bed on planks and stepping stones, water trickling around our boots, the green walls closing overhead. Lia trailed her fingers along the wet ferns and grinned like a child. It is the kind of place that makes you understand why film crews come here to imagine prehistory. It genuinely feels like a world before people.

The lush vertical fern-covered walls of Fern Canyon

Where the Forest Meets the Sea

What surprised me most is that the redwoods run almost to the ocean. On our last afternoon we followed a trail out of the trees and suddenly the forest gave way to a wild, wind-scoured Pacific coastline, sea stacks rising out of the surf and the fog rolling in off grey water. Below Klamath, at the overlook, we watched a herd of Roosevelt elk graze a bluff above the beach, unbothered, magnificent. The two worlds — ancient forest and open ocean — sit side by side here, and standing on that edge with the wind in our faces and the redwoods at our backs, Lia and I agreed we’d rarely felt so far from everything.

Roosevelt elk grazing on a coastal bluff above the Pacific near Klamath

Getting There

Redwood National Park stretches along California’s far north coast, roughly a five-to-six-hour drive north of San Francisco up Highway 101 — a long, beautiful haul best broken over two days. The gateway towns of Crescent City and Eureka bracket the park with rooms and supplies, while the small settlement of Orick sits at its southern edge. Come ready for cool, damp weather any time of year; the fog is not a flaw but the very thing that keeps these giants alive. We gave it three days and left wishing we’d given it a week. Walk slowly here. The trees have waited a thousand years for you.