The coast redwoods at Redwood National and State Parks are the tallest living things on earth. Hyperion, the current record holder at 380 feet, lives somewhere in this park in a location the NPS keeps undisclosed to protect it from foot traffic. The four tallest known trees on earth are all here. Numbers don't fully prepare you for what it feels like to stand at the base of a tree that has been growing since before Rome fell.
The park preserves 45 percent of all remaining old-growth coast redwood forest — today only 5 percent of the original old-growth stands remain, along a narrow coastal strip where summer fog provides the moisture these trees require. Walking into old-growth redwood forest is an experience of light and scale that's difficult to describe without sounding like a brochure: the canopy 200 feet above you, the understory of ferns and sorrel below, the silence that comes from being inside something that large.
The Prairie Creek section has a grove called the Grove of the Titans with some of the largest-diameter trees in the park. Lady Bird Johnson Grove has an accessible loop through old-growth. The Lady Bird Grove is where President Nixon dedicated the national park expansion in 1969 — her dedication is commemorated there.
The park also protects 37 miles of coastline, with beaches and sea stacks and the kind of weather that keeps the redwoods green. Gold Bluffs Beach, accessible by dirt road, is one of the wilder coastal camping experiences in California. The elk herds that graze the meadows near the coast are a regular feature. Redwoods is one of the parks where you arrive thinking you understand it and leave knowing you don't.