Stout Memorial Grove

Frank D. Stout made his money in timber, from Chicago, and among his holdings was the Del Norte Company, which logged along the Smith River. He died in 1927. Two years later, on September 11, 1929, his family gave the state forty-four acres of old-growth redwood where Mill Creek meets the Smith, bought for $80,000 with gifts that Save the Redwoods League gathered from donors across the country. It was the first grove in what became Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.

There is a plain irony in a timber fortune's memorial taking the form of the trees the trade was cutting. It is also the reason the grove is still standing.

What makes Stout Grove look unlike most redwood forests is the river. The Smith floods over the flat in big winters, laying down silt and scouring out the young trees and shrubs that would crowd a drier stand. The result is a forest almost entirely of redwoods, columns over three hundred feet tall rising from a floor of sword fern with long sight lines between them.

The loop is half a mile and nearly level. In summer a seasonal footbridge crosses the Smith from the state park campground; the rest of the year, come in by Howland Hill Road.