Rockefeller Forest is the showpiece of Humboldt Redwoods State Park, which describes it as the largest remaining old-growth redwood forest in the world. It lies west of the Avenue of the Giants along Bull Creek, on a side road that leaves the Avenue just north of Founders Grove and continues toward Honeydew. Save the Redwoods League helped add its ninety-four hundred acres to the park in the nineteen thirties, and the park later came to hold the entire Bull Creek watershed. The Rockefeller Loop, on Lower Bull Creek Flats Road, offers a short walk among these trees, and the park has about one hundred miles of trails beyond it. The side trip trades the towns of the Avenue for a narrow road through old growth.
Back just north of Founders Grove, a road turned off west toward Bull Creek — and if you have an extra hour, go back, because that turn leads to the crown jewel of the entire redwood world. Rockefeller Forest is the largest unbroken stand of old-growth coast redwood left anywhere on the planet — around ten thousand acres of trees that have never been cut, several of them among the tallest trees ever measured. It exists because in the nineteen twenties John D. Rockefeller Junior was brought out here to see what was being lost, and he wrote a check — about two million dollars, matched by the state — and by nineteen thirty-one that bought better than nine thousand acres of Dyerville flats out from under the lumber company. Rockefeller refused to have it named for him. For twenty years it was the Bull Creek–Dyerville Forest; they only put his name on it in nineteen fifty-one.
One more thing about Bull Creek, because it taught this park a hard lesson. The giants down on those flats were protected — but the ridges above them weren't, and they got clearcut. So when the big floods came in the fifties and sixties, the bare slopes shed their soil, the creek jammed with logs, and it undercut and toppled hundreds of old-growth giants that had stood a thousand years and were supposedly safe. The park had to go buy the whole upper watershed to stop it. You cannot save the grove without saving the ridge above it. And the creek's older name belongs to the Sinkyone people, whose country this is — they called it Lolangkok, and their descendants are still here.
Photo: Jay Sturner · CC BY 2.0