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California’s Coastal Redwoods were found to be " the most unthinkably glorious body of timber to be found anywhere!" by Jack London, famous California author, and have inspired poets, painters, playwrights, and musicians with their tall silent beauty and serenity. At the turn of the century in California, poets, artists and actors made regular pilgrimages to the trees and hosted artistic extravaganzas in their midst.

The tallest trees in California are the Coast Redwoods, close relatives of the Giant Sequoias. The Coast Redwoods reach heights of 367.8 feet – that is over 40xs as tall as a one-story house! They live to be over 2,000 years old, and have a much slimmer trunk than the Sequoias. The three oldest trees all live with in one mile of each other.

The Coast Redwoods require a moist temperate rainforest environment to live in, and their type of tree once covered parts of Japan, the Himalayas, Western Europe, and much more of North America 100 million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs. Their weight can be up to 1.6 million pounds, their bark can be up to 12 inches thick, and their bases 22 feet in diameter.

The Coast Redwood requires at least 25 in. of rainfall to survive and double that for optimum growth. Fog, common in the coastal mountains the trees are now found in, provides up to 50 in of additional water to the Redwood as well as retarding evaporation in the summer. The Coast Redwood do not have a central water seeking tap root found in other trees instead it has several main roots, not deeper than six feet. These roots have a remarkable ability to regenerate themselves if cut.

Who’s the Tallest One of All?

The "Tall Trees Club" maintains a list of all known "tall trees" (designated as those over 340 feet in height). Of the 36 "Tallest Trees" on the Tall Trees Club list, over half of them are in Humboldt Redwoods State Park/Rockefeller Forest* that has 20 trees counted and at least another 20 remain to be counted that appear to belong to the Tall Trees Club. The Montgomery State reserve and Redwood National Park each have 6 of the Tall Trees. Jedidiah Smith State Park has 3 tall trees and Prairie Creek state Park has one.

*Located along the scenic redwood forest attraction called Avenue of the Giants, Humboldt Redwoods State Park encompasses 52,000 acres, including over 17,000 acres of ancient old-growth coast redwood forest. The park includes the Rockefeller Forest, the largest remaining contiguous old-growth coast redwood forest in the world. The trees in the park are thousands of years old and have never been logged. This forest is as pristine now as it was 100 years ago.

• Take a Coastal Redwoods Virtual Tour

• Humboldt Redwoods State Park/Rockefeller Forest: 20 trees
• Montgomery State Reserve: 6 trees