Founders Grove lies just off the Avenue of the Giants on Dyerville Loop Road, and its half-mile trail is the easiest way to stand among the park's largest trees. The accessible loop runs beside the Dyerville Giant, a redwood of about three hundred seventy feet that fell in nineteen ninety-one. Nearby stands the Founders Tree, measured at three hundred forty-six feet and dedicated in nineteen thirty-one to the people who started Save the Redwoods League. Booklets at the start of the trail explain the walk, and the tree has long been a focus of ceremonies in the redwood region. Parking here is free, which is true across the park except at Williams Grove. Travelers with time for a single short walk on the Avenue will find this one hard to beat.
If you take only one walk on this entire drive, take this one. Founders Grove is on your right, and the loop trail is barely half a mile, flat, smooth, and easy enough for nearly anyone. Park and walk it. The grove is named for the founders of the Save-the-Redwoods League, the people who started buying these groves out from under the saws back in nineteen eighteen, and the Founders Tree here stands about three hundred and forty feet tall. What the trail does that a car window never can is give you the silence — the light coming down green and dim through three hundred feet of canopy, the sorrel like clover on the floor, the sound of your own footsteps going soft on the duff. And lying on the ground in that grove is the most astonishing thing in the park — a fallen giant. Go stand at its root wall, and remember the night Boone told you about.
Photo: Daderot · CC0