Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

The coast redwood is the tallest living thing on the planet, and the groves along Prairie Creek are some of the finest anywhere. These trees can climb well over three hundred feet and live for many centuries, growing so thick that the light on the forest floor turns soft and green even at midday. The forest here is old growth, meaning it was never cut, so the biggest trees have stood since long before Europeans reached this coast.

That survival was not luck. Between the 1880s and the early 1900s, logging stripped thousands of acres of the North Coast redwoods, and the losses alarmed a group of conservationists enough that they founded the Save the Redwoods League in 1918. Through decades of quiet fund-raising and land purchase, the League and the State of California pieced together the groves that became Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, saving them one stand at a time from the saw.

The park's showpiece is Fern Canyon, a narrow gorge cut by Home Creek where the walls rise sheer and every surface drips with ferns, several different kinds of them, layered green from the stream to the rim. It is a strange, prehistoric place, cool and dim and dripping, and it looked so much like the dawn of time that a Jurassic Park film used it as a location. Walking the canyon floor between those living green walls is the thing most visitors remember longest.

The other great draw is the elk. Roosevelt elk, the largest elk in North America, were hunted nearly to nothing on this coast, down to a few hundred animals when protection began. They have come back into the thousands, and the open meadow of Elk Prairie, right by the park's main visitor center, is one of the surest places anywhere to watch a herd graze in the open. In autumn the bulls bugle and spar, a wild sound worth pulling over for.

Beyond the big trees, the park reaches all the way to the ocean at Gold Bluffs Beach, a broad, wild strand backed by tall golden cliffs where elk sometimes wander down to the sand. The road out is gravel and crosses shallow water, part of the adventure of getting there, and it opens onto some of the emptiest, most dramatic coastline in California.

Between the trees and the sea runs a web of soft, quiet trails, from short strolls among the giants to longer routes that link the groves to the canyon and the beach. Because the state park is joined with Redwood National Park, a single visit lets you walk from ancient forest to fern canyon to wild ocean without ever really leaving the preserve. It is the kind of place that rewards a slow day and an early start ahead of the fog.

Prairie Creek lies just north of the small town of Orick, off Highway 101 on the far North Coast, roughly fifty miles north of Eureka. The old parkway that threads the groves is a slow, beautiful drive in its own right, and the main visitor center sits at the edge of Elk Prairie, a good first stop for maps, trail advice, and word on road and creek conditions.

This is cool, wet, foggy country even in summer, so pack layers and shoes that can handle mud. Fuel up and gather food and water in Orick or Klamath before you head in, since services thin out fast once you are among the trees. Give yourself a full unhurried day if you can, enough to stand under the tallest trees on Earth, watch a herd of wild elk, and walk the fern-hung canyon that looks like the world before us.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.