Drive Through a Giant Redwood in Northern California

The Drive-Through Trees Are the Smallest Redwoods You’ll See

The Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree at Leggett on Highway 1 is 315 feet tall and 6 feet wide through the tunnel, which sounds impressive until you walk among the trees in the old-growth sections of Humboldt Redwoods State Park 60 miles north. Those trees reach 380 feet and their bases can be as wide as a room. The drive-through trees have tunnels cut into their trunks – an act that weakens structural integrity somewhat, which is why the surviving examples are curiosities rather than normal forestry. The largest trees don’t have tunnels through them because that would kill them.

This is not a complaint about the drive-through trees. The Chandelier Tree is genuinely worth a stop and its $10 per-car admission is reasonable. Drive or walk through, stand next to it, have the scale register. It takes 20 minutes and delivers exactly what it promises. Then drive north, because the actual reason to come to Northern California’s coast is the forest that surrounds it.

The Avenue of the Giants

The Avenue of the Giants is a 31-mile scenic route running parallel to US-101 through Humboldt Redwoods State Park, following the Eel River through some of the densest concentrations of old-growth coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) remaining on earth. Coastal redwoods are the tallest living organisms on the planet. They survive on the specific conditions of this coast – the Pacific fog that rolls inland each morning, the heavy winter rainfall, the mild temperature range – and nowhere else in the world replicates those conditions in quite this combination.

Walking among the old-growth trees in the Founders Grove (a 1-mile loop off the Avenue, with some of the largest accessible specimens) or in the Rockefeller Forest (the largest remaining old-growth redwood forest in the world at roughly 10,000 acres, reached via a short walk from the Bull Creek Flats area) is not a forest walk in any ordinary sense. The scale is comprehensible only in person: a single tree wider than most living rooms, the canopy so high above that looking straight up causes a slight vertigo, and the extraordinary quiet of a forest this dense. It is the best free natural experience in California.

Fern Canyon

Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, north of the Avenue of the Giants near the town of Orick, is a narrow slot canyon with walls 50 feet high covered floor to ceiling in five-finger ferns. The floor is a shallow creek; you wade through it (waterproof footwear essential, or shoes you don’t mind soaking). The canyon appeared in Jurassic Park 2, which at least confirms it looks appropriately prehistoric. The walk takes about 45 minutes and delivers a landscape found nowhere else on the North Coast.

Getting There

The Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree at Leggett is 180 miles north of San Francisco on Highway 1 (coastal, winding, spectacular, slow) or Highway 101 (faster inland). Humboldt Redwoods State Park is about 240-250 miles from San Francisco. Redwood National and State Parks (Fern Canyon) are 330-plus miles from the city; most visitors who reach the far north spend at least two nights. The coastal Highway 1 between Leggett and the Bay Area is worth driving in its own right – the Sonoma and Mendocino coast sections are among the most dramatic coastal drives in North America – but allow significantly more time than the map distance suggests.

Practical Notes

No mobile signal in most of Humboldt. Download offline maps before leaving cell range. The trees look best in fog or overcast conditions, which describes most mornings year-round on this coast. Summer weekends bring crowds to the Avenue of the Giants; a weekday in May, June, or September gives you long stretches of the forest almost alone. The park has no entry fee at most locations.