US-101: The Redwood Coast

The Route at a Glance

This is a drive through what was saved. Old-growth redwood once ran almost unbroken along this coast, in the homelands of the Sinkyone, Wiyot, Yurok and Tolowa Dee-ni'. Most of it was cut, and the road north from Leggett strings together the places people managed to buy before the saws reached them.

The first hour follows the South Fork of the Eel. At Phillipsville, leave the freeway for the Avenue of the Giants, the old highway through Humboldt Redwoods State Park, which runs about thirty miles beside the new one. Founders Grove honours the three men who started Save the Redwoods League and now says plainly what else they believed. A few miles west on the Mattole Road, Rockefeller Forest shows what happened to a protected grove when the slopes above it were logged.

North of the Avenue the road follows the Eel toward Humboldt Bay. In Eureka the Carson Mansion stands over the waterfront its builder milled; in Arcata the town's wastewater runs through the Arcata Marsh on its way to the bay. Above Trinidad, Sue-meg State Park carries its Yurok name again.

At Orick the national park begins. A permit and a steep two miles take you down to Tall Trees Grove, where a 1963 measurement helped put the park's boundary on Redwood Creek; a gravel road west of the highway reaches Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon, where the beach-gold rush of 1850 came to very little. Beyond the Klamath the road climbs over the headlands to Crescent City, whose harbor has been rebuilt to take the next tsunami, and a short drive inland along the Smith River reaches Stout Memorial Grove.

From Crescent City it is about twenty minutes to the Oregon line. The whole run is a long half day without stops, and two or three days with them.

The Drive, Stop by Stop

9 stops along the route, in driving order from Leggett, California to Oregon state line, north of Crescent City. 3 of them sit off the road itself — the distance is noted on each.

1. 1

   Founders Grove

   Weott

   A grove named for three men who saved redwoods and preached race science, and the trailside sign that now says both.

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2. 2

   Rockefeller Forest

   Weott

   Generally counted the largest old-growth redwood forest left, bought in 1931 and nearly lost anyway to logging on the slopes above it.

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3. 3

   Carson Mansion

   Eureka

   The house Eureka's biggest lumberman began in 1884 on the bluff above his own mill, and the story told about why.

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4. 4

   Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary

   Arcata

   A wildlife sanctuary that is also the town's sewage works, because Arcata turned down the state's plan.

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5. 5

   Sue-meg State Park

   Trinidad

   A Yurok place that carried a settler's name for ninety years and took its own back in 2021.

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6. 6

   Tall Trees Grove

   Orick

   4.0 miles off the route

   Where a 1963 measurement found the world's tallest known tree on timber company land, and helped decide where a national park would go.

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7. 7

   Gold Bluffs Beach and Fern Canyon

   Orick

   3.0 miles off the route

   A beach that set off a gold stampede in 1850, and the fern-walled slot a creek has cut through the same bluffs.

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8. 8

   Crescent City Harbor

   Crescent City

   The harbor the Pacific aims its tsunamis at, rebuilt after 2011 to ride the next one out.

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9. 9

   Stout Memorial Grove

   Hiouchi

   3.4 miles off the route

   A lumberman's memorial made of the kind of forest his company cut, kept open underneath by the river's floods.

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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let US-101: The Redwood Coast do what it does best.