Boardwalk installed to protect redwoods
A grove of ancient redwoods that had suffered a decade’s worth of damage from tourists in California’s far north has been retrofitted with a new boardwalk to shield it from further abuse.
The Grove of Titans, a cluster of hulking coast redwoods inside Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in Crescent City, stands among thousands of old-growth redwoods in the forests of the North Coast. For decades following the park’s opening in 1929, the grove was relatively undisturbed, tucked off-trail in the park’s remote interior.
That changed in 2011, when the grove’s exact location was published online and widely disseminated among nature enthusiasts. Overnight, the redwoods, whose crowns extend higher than 300 feet in the air — ranking them among the world’s tallest trees — became a popular destination for some of the park’s hundreds of thousands of visitors.
The problem was, there was no established path to the grove — the nearest trail passes a few dozen yards away — so people created many of their own, trampling the
forest’s fragile understory in the process.
“This place was almost loved to death,” said Erin Gates, acting deputy superintendent for Redwood National and State Parks, North Coast Redwoods District. “We had an overabundance of visitors causing irreversible damage to the place they were coming to see.”
The uptick in public interest surrounding the North Coast’s tallest trees has begged the question of whether it’s appropriate to guard information about their locations as a preservation imperative. Though some of these great redwoods have been ascribed legendary names like Hyperion and Lost Monarch, government land