Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park

The coast redwood is the tallest living thing on earth, reads the Redwoods State Parks brochure. Standing among the tree giants, I am grateful to the generations of civic-minded people that worked tirelessly to preserve and protect these old growth forests, and also amazed that the oldest of these trees are only about 1500 years old, and are themselves just a momentary blip in the history of our planet. It’s a humbling thought as a human, to be so small and so finite.

The van is parked directly underneath one such giant redwood, in a quiet campsite (number 55 is a great spot!) next to the Smith River at Jedediah Smith Campground. Won and I have had the good fortune of visiting many national parks during the shoulder seasons of March and October. We have had the Grand Canyon and the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park to ourselves. Here at the Redwoods in mid March, there were plenty of first come first serve sites at the ever-popular Jedediah Smith campground, and the Grove of the Titans was nearly deserted on our hike yesterday.

Yet the days are sunny, and the weather is perfect. Just chilly enough in the morning to make you grateful for a steaming cup of coffee, and just warm enough in the late afternoon to enjoy a few moments by the campfire at dusk.

We spend our days meandering through grove after grove of gigantic trees. I pretend I’m a wood Elf, and I might run into an Ent, shepherd of the trees, around each bend in the trail.

The Redwoods is actually a patchwork of parks, sometimes separately, sometimes jointly, run by the state of California or the federal National Park Service. We head south tomorrow, down Hwy 101 and the Newton B Drury Parkway, to another section of the park that is on the coast.

March 31, 2022