Rockefeller Forest

The flats along Bull Creek carry some of the tallest and heaviest forest on earth, with the redwood canopy averaging more than three hundred feet. Save the Redwoods League wanted this stand from the start. The purchase came in 1931, after long negotiation with the Pacific Lumber Company, with John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s money matched by private gifts and the state. Rockefeller asked that it not carry his family's name, and until 1951 it was the Bull Creek-Dyerville Forest.

What the purchase did not include was the hillsides. From 1946 the upper Bull Creek watershed, still in private hands, was logged hard, and in December 1955 heavy rain fell on the bare slopes. The flood came down the creek carrying mud, slash, cull logs and the wreckage of the settlement at Bull Creek, filled the channel and cut away its banks, and big redwoods on the protected flats toppled into it. The 1964 flood did it again. Between the two, hundreds of large trees were lost.

The lesson changed how redwoods are protected: a grove is only as safe as the watershed above it. The state spent the following decades buying out the rest of Bull Creek, and the creek is still being nursed back.

The Rockefeller Loop is a flat half-mile on the flats; the Bull Creek trails go much farther.