Drive Through a Giant Redwood in Northern California

Drive-Through Redwoods and the Northern California Coast: What’s Worth Your Time

The drive-through redwood trees are exactly what they sound like: living trees with tunnels cut through their trunks wide enough for a single car to pass through. There are three remaining ones in Northern California. The most famous is the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree at Leggett on Highway 1, privately owned, charging a modest admission fee (around $10 per car) to drive through or walk through. The tree is 315 feet tall and the tunnel cut through its base is roughly 6 feet wide and 6 feet 9 inches high. Vehicles up to about 6.5 feet wide and 8 feet high can pass through. You take a photograph, you wonder at the scale, you move on. It takes twenty minutes and it genuinely is what it promises.

Two others exist: Shrine Drive-Thru Tree at Myers Flat (privately owned, similar admission), and Tour-Thru Tree in Klamath near the Redwood National and State Parks.

None of the drive-through trees are particularly large by coastal redwood standards. The largest trees in Redwood National and State Parks grow to 380 feet and are tens of feet in diameter; you cannot drive through them because that would kill them. The drive-through trees have tunnels cut into them, an act that weakens the structural integrity somewhat, which is why the surviving trees are a curiosity rather than a normal feature of the forest.

The Actual Reason to Go to Northern California: The Redwood Forests

The Avenue of the Giants is a 31-mile parallel route to US-101 through Humboldt Redwoods State Park, following the Eel River through some of the densest concentrations of old-growth coastal redwood. Coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the tallest living things on earth; they need the fog that rolls in from the Pacific and the heavy winter rainfall of this coast to survive. The oldest documented coastal redwood is over 2,000 years old.

Walking among the trees in the old-growth sections is different from any other forest experience. The scale is comprehensible only in person: a single tree base wider than most rooms, the canopy so high that looking up requires tipping your head back to an uncomfortable angle, and the extraordinary quiet of a forest this dense. The Founders Grove (about 1-mile loop from the Avenue of the Giants) has some of the largest accessible trees; the Rockefeller Forest is the largest remaining old-growth redwood forest in the world (about 10,000 acres) and requires a short walk from the Bull Creek Flats area.

Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park (north of the Avenue of the Giants, near the town of Orick) is a narrow canyon with walls covered from floor to nearly 50 feet high in five-finger ferns. The bottom is a small creek that you wade through (waterproof boots or shoes you don’t mind getting wet are essential). It appeared in Jurassic Park 2. It takes about 45 minutes to walk and is one of the most extraordinary small landscapes in California.

Getting There

The Leggett Chandelier Tree is 180 miles north of San Francisco on Highway 1 (the coastal route, winding and spectacular but slow) or Highway 101 (faster, inland). Humboldt Redwoods State Park and the Avenue of the Giants are further north, around 240-250 miles from San Francisco. Redwood National and State Parks (with Fern Canyon) are 330+ miles from San Francisco; most visitors who go to the far north spend 2-3 nights in the region.

The coastal Highway 1 between Leggett and the San Francisco Bay Area is genuinely spectacular and is the main reason to drive it rather than the faster inland route, but allow double the time it looks on the map.

Practical Notes

No mobile signal in most of the Humboldt forest. Download offline maps. The trees are best in fog or overcast conditions, which is most mornings year-round. Summer weekends bring significant crowds to the Avenue of the Giants; visit on a weekday in May, June, or September for a quieter experience. The park has no entry fee at most locations; the drive-through trees charge per car as noted.