REDWOOD The Redwood State Parks

Forever. The word takes on a new meaning as you stand in the shadowy stillness of a grove of California's famed redwood trees. In these surroundings, it isn't hard to imagine the great forests of these majestic trees that once covered large areas of what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, where their fossil records date back a hundred million years.

Hammond Grove, Humboldt Redwoods State Park. (Department of Parks and Recreation)

As an ice age came and went, as the climate and shape of the land changed, the range of the trees became more and more restricted, and today the only naturally occurring live specimens are found in California, the southwestern tip of Oregon, and a small area in central China. The trees are relative latecomers to California; the oldest fossils found here date back, at most, a mere fifteen million years or so. The redwoods replaced a forest of tropical trees, relatives of such present-day varieties as fig, palm, and mahogany, which could not survive the cooler temperatures.

TWO KINDS OF REDWOODS

California has not just one, but two distinct types of redwoods. The coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), which rarely grows more than thirty miles from the ocean in an irregular strip extending roughly from Monterey County to southwestern Oregon, is the taller — some specimens reach over 350 feet in height — but the Sierra redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), which grows in groves scattered on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, is both larger and older; its diameter occasionally goes over 35 feet at ground level, and some specimens may be as much as 4000 years old, versus the coast redwood's greatest known age of 2200 years.

The fire scar on this Sierra redwood is slowly healing. (Department of Parks and Recreation)

Some of the tallest trees in the world grow along California's Redwood Highway. (Department of Parks and Recreation)