The Road Through the Redwoods Never Gets Old

There is no way to describe the first time you drive through a redwood grove, but I'll try. You turn off the highway onto a two-lane road, and within a hundred yards the light changes. It goes green and gold and soft, filtered through layers of needles and branches hundreds of feet above your car. The temperature drops five degrees. The sound of the road fades to a hush. And then you look up, and you realize you can't see the tops of the trees, and something in your chest shifts.

We drove the Avenue of the Giants on a Tuesday in early October, which turned out to be the perfect time. The summer crowds had thinned, the fog was still rolling in from the coast in the mornings, and the light through the canopy was the kind of thing photographers spend years chasing. We had no agenda. We stopped whenever something caught our eye, which was roughly every quarter mile.

Driving Beneath Giants

The thing that surprised me most wasn't the height of the trees, though that alone is enough to make you pull over and stare. It was the scale of the ecosystem. Fallen redwoods the size of city buses lie on the forest floor, and new trees grow out of their trunks in straight lines, like children standing on their grandfather's shoulders. Ferns the size of dining tables carpet the ground. The air smells like damp earth and cedar and something older than either.

We pulled into a small pull-off near the Rockefeller Forest and walked a loop trail that took about an hour. There were maybe six other people on the trail, all of them walking slowly, all of them looking up. Nobody talked much. There was nothing to say that the trees weren't already saying. I put my hand on the bark of one tree that was estimated to be over two thousand years old, and I felt, for a moment, genuinely small in a way that was not unpleasant.

The Small Towns at the Edge of the Forest

The redwoods are the main event, but the towns that dot the highway are worth your time too. We stayed in Garberville, a small town with a main street that feels like it hasn't changed much since the 1970s, in the best possible way. We ate at a diner where the menu was handwritten and the pie was made that morning. We bought coffee from a roaster who talked to us for twenty minutes about the difference between shade-grown and sun-grown beans, and we pretended to understand.

Further north, in Ferndale, we found a town of Victorian storefronts that felt like a movie set, except that people actually live there. We walked through an old cemetery on a hill above town, where the headstones date back to the 1800s and the fog rolls in like it's on a schedule. It was the kind of place that makes you want to stay another night, so we did.

If you go, drive slowly. The road through the redwoods is not a race. Pull over for every overlook. Get out of the car. Touch the bark. Listen to the silence. The trees have been there for thousands of years, and they will be there long after you're gone, and there is something deeply comforting about that, if you let yourself feel it.