What We Learned from California's Redwoods Forests, Part I

On September 22nd we awoke in Crater Lake NP to freezing cold rain. In fact, we went to bed with the rain too, which meant that our tent, picnic shelter, rain gear, and the surrounding campsite were fully soaked and incredibly muddy. Packing up in such conditions is always rotten because things get haphazardly stuffed into the car before departure. We hoped to find drier weather south in Northern California, but of course, this part of the country is famous for misty, foggy, cool, and wet conditions.

Despite the weather, we found the forests of giant redwood trees to be spectacular. For kids born in the 1970's like us, California's redwood trees are embedded in our minds for their role as the scenery on the Ewok planet Endor in the 1983 Star Wars film, "Return of the Jedi". And walking among these giants allowed us to imagine our very own Ewok encounters.

As you might be able to see in the images below, these trees are some of the largest organisms in the world. Mature trees reach well over 300 feet tall and can be as old as 2,000 years (fourth-graders, that's 20 hundreds, or 200 tens)! They're critical for establishing and maintaining temperate rainforest conditions.

The evolutionary history of the redwoods goes back to the Jurassic, a few hundred million years ago when dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrate fauna around the world. During that time redwood and sequoia trees were far more common, but today redwoods are restricted to a 450 mile stretch of California and Oregon's coastline, where ideal climactic conditions have retained these forests as living fossils. Redwoods need cool, wet, and foggy conditions, and the Pacific coast fog of Northern California is vital to these forests.  In fact, nearly half of their moisture intake comes directly from fog.

The trees have relatively shallow root systems (10-12 feet deep) that radiate outward hundreds of feet and interweave with surrounding redwood neighbors. Thus, a grove of redwoods exhibits mechanical integrity that is greater than the sum of the individual tree's root systems. Together redwoods in a forest stand strong against forceful coastal winds and storm systems.


How they grow into these mighty stands is in large part by cloning themselves from parent trees. Often you will see a large tree (even a dead tree) with a circle of similarly aged daughter trees all around.


Redwoods form large root burls that stay ready to sprout new growth in the event of injury to the parent tree. Often root burls can be seen with fairly large redwood growth emerging from them (Grace and Julia are standing on and amongst burls below).


Not unlike the giant long-leaf pine forests of the U.S. southeastern coastal plain, wildfire has played a crucial role in redwood ecology. Periodic natural fires have sweep through these forests and this is an important part of the evolutionary history of these forests. The redwoods, with their massively thick bark, are adapted to this regime.


We learned that the original loggers to explore through these forests bypassed the redwoods in favor of other old growth trees, This was because logging equipment had yet to be invented that could fell and mill these giants. Of course this all changed in the early 1900's as logging technology evolved to process such huge trees. The next chapter in the redwoods' is common. What took hundreds of millions of years to evolve was decimated in decades. Fortunately for us, many individuals and groups had the foresight to protect the remaining old growth forests, which are appreciated by thousands of visitors each year . Too bad the same can't be said for Georgia's long-leaf pine forests. These were ravaged at the end of the 19th century with no champion for their cause.