A walk along the Redwood Creek Trail at Redwood National and State Parks can take you into the big trees and deep into nature/Patrick Cone

Last summer, my wife, son, and I headed inland after traveling down the Oregon Coast, opting to spend a day hiking the beach in Redwood National Park before heading up the Bald Hills Road to the east of the town of Orick. The road climbed along a ridge, until a pullout afforded us a view down into a verdant valley: Redwood Creek. It stretched to the southern horizon, and looked big, wild and cool, with ferns, flowers and tall trees. We were intrigued, and vowed to come back.

Redwood Creek is a vast watershed, extending 61 miles to the south of its estuary on the Pacific. In 1978 this lower third of the creek was included in the expansion of Redwood National Park, but not without controversy and pushback from the locals. Upstream of the park, the private land is still being commercially logged for redwoods and other species. Within the park, old logging roads are being rehabilitated, but massive redwood stumps speak to the logging days that once filled this lower part of the valley.

So back in the park this past July, we took a day to walk up the lower part of Redwood Creek. While there are three other access points, the Redwood Creek Trail is certainly the most popular, and accessible, just half a mile east of Highway 101. The parking lot was once the home of the Orick Lumber Company back in the 1940s and 1950s, when these giant trees fell to the saw and ax. But, surprisingly, just to the southeast, an 8,000-acre grove of redwoods was left untouched, one of the largest remaining stands of big trees.

As we made our lunch at the trailhead, we watched a number of backpacking groups collect their gear, since dispersed camping is permitted on the gravel bars above MacArther Creek, with a permit, of course. Heeding warning signs about vehicle break-ins, we took our cameras and valuables with us, and walked up this easy and beautiful trail. It was a good thing we brought our camera gear, as the forest here is dark and primeval and speaks to a land of long ago.

Seasonal bridges make it easy to cross Redwood Creek/Patrick Cone

Along the way were big leaf maples, red alder, giant redwoods, azaleas, blackberries and ferns, which filled every square inch of ground above the stream banks. Three hundred-foot redwoods line the trail, and where fallen giants had been cut to make way for the trail, hundreds of years of climate history were revealed. Banana slugs seemed especially interested in these slabs, as they clung to the wet wood. An osprey nest was visible in a dead snag to the west as we crossed the first of two bridges on the creek. A prairie a few miles up is home to a herd of Roosevelt Elk, but we didn’t see these elusive beasts.

The Tall Trees Grove was 8 miles up the creek, too far for an out-and-back day hike with an earlier start, but would be a perfectly lovely and isolated place to camp. But, we enjoyed the forest and crystal waters of the first few miles of the stream, a welcome respite from an unseasonable heat wave. Since it was mid-summer, the water was clear and cool, but it’s not always so placid. These two bridges are removed every year, to make way for the high waters during the rainy season, and there have been large floods that roared down the valley in the mid-1900s. We ate lunch along the stream, where the rock cobbles made great skipping stones, and a deep pool made for a refreshing dip, too.

We headed back along the trail holding hands, refreshed by the quiet solitude of the forest.

Redwood Creek empties into the Pacific Ocean/NPS