The first time I drove the Avenue of the Giants, I missed half of it because I was too busy staring upward through my windshield like some kind of mesmerized idiot.
This 31-mile stretch of old Highway 101 winds through Humboldt Redwoods State Park in Northern California, and honestly, calling it a “scenic drive” feels like calling the Grand Canyon a “decent hole.” The coast redwoods here—Sequoia sempervirens, if you want to get technical about it—are the tallest living things on Earth, some pushing 370 feet, which is, I don’t know, roughly the height of a 35-story building, give or take. They’re also old. Like, really old. We’re talking trees that were already ancient when the Roman Empire was just getting started, some of them around 2,000 years old, though the species itself has been around for maybe 20 million years. The canopy is so dense that even on bright days, you’re driving through this perpetual green twilight that makes you feel like you’ve accidentally wandered into some kind of primordial sanctuary where humans are just tolerated visitors.
Turns out, that feeling isn’t totally wrong. These forests used to cover about 2 million acres along the California and Oregon coast. Now? Less than 5% of that original old-growth remains. Most of it got logged between the 1850s and 1970s, because redwood timber is straight-grained, rot-resistant, and absurdly valuable.
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Here’s the thing about driving through this place: the trees don’t just surround you—they reconfigure your sense of scale entirely. I used to think I understood what “tall” meant until I stood next to a redwood with a trunk diameter wider than my car. The bark is this weird fibrous stuff, almost soft-looking, colored somewhere between rust and cinnamon, and it can be a foot thick in places. That thickness, combined with the tree’s tannin-rich wood, makes them surprisingly fire-resistant, which is part of how they’ve survived this long. Some trees have hollow, charred bases from fires that happened centuries ago, and they’re still growing just fine. Wait—maybe “fine” isn’t the right word. They’re thriving.
The Avenue itself was deliberately preserved as a scenic route in the 1960s when the new Highway 101 was built. Smart move, honestly.
What gets me every time is how quiet it is once you step out of your car. The forest floor is this soft carpet of sorrel, ferns, and decomposing needles—redwoods drop about a ton of organic matter per acre per year, which sounds excessive until you realize it’s basically how they build their own soil. The understory is dim and cool, even in summer, and there’s this smell, kind of sweet and earthy and ancient all at once, that I can’t quite describe but that immediately makes my shoulders drop about three inches. Scientists have actually measured this effect—spending time in old-growth forests lowers cortisol levels, reduces blood pressure, and generally makes humans less anxious. The Japanese call it “shinrin-yoku” or forest bathing, and there’s a growing body of research suggesting it’s not just woo-woo nature mysticism but actual measurable physiology.
Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that this isn’t just a drive. It’s more like a pilgrimage, except nobody tells you that beforehand.
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The thing about coast redwoods is they can only survive in a very particular climate zone—basically a narrow coastal strip where fog rolls in regularly from the Pacific. They need that fog. It provides maybe 40% of their water during the dry summer months, condensing on their needles and dripping down or being absorbed directly through the leaves. No fog, no redwoods. Climate change is already shifting fog patterns along the California coast, and scientists are, understandably, pretty worried about what that means for these ecosystems over the next century. Some models suggest the habitable zone for redwoods could shift northward or disappear entirely in some areas. Which is a depressing thought I try not to dwell on while I’m actually there, though it’s hard not to.
There are pull-offs all along the Avenue where you can park and walk among the trees, and I definately recommend doing that rather than just driving through. The Founders Grove has a self-guided trail that’s easy and takes maybe 20 minutes if you’re not stopping every ten seconds to gawk. The Dyerville Giant is there too—a 370-foot redwood that fell in 1991 and is still just lying there, being enormous horizontally instead of vertically.
Sometimes I think about the fact that these trees were here before cars, before roads, before the concept of tourism itself, and now we’ve paved a path right through their world so we can experience them for 45 minutes before heading to our next destination. It’s weird. It feels both privileged and intrusive.
But I keep going back anyway.
