The rapid destruction of the redwood forest forced citizen groups, led mostly by women, to act to protect these leviathans of the land. Local chapters of the California Federation of Women’s Clubs made the first protective purchases of old-growth redwood groves. The Save-the-Redwoods League was formed, led by Newton Drury, to buy more land. Drury then guided the California State Parks to set aside major tracts of virgin redwood forest. The federal government established Redwood National Park in 1968 to protect and restore fragile watersheds that had been severely damaged by logging roads and clear-cutting.
Corkscrew Tree and Car - ca. 1920s
The Corkscrew Tree is located in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, a short walk from the Newton B. Drury Parkway. It was formed as a “family (or faerie) circle” when buds from the basal burl burst forth and grew into four new trees, all connected to the “mother” tree at her base. Why did the four trees twist around the trunk of the mother tree? Perhaps neighboring trees fell, casting more light that the budding trees grew towards. It’s a mystery.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Courtesy of Humboldt State University
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Herbert Hoover at the Stout Tree - 1928
On a camping trip to the redwoods in Del Norte State Park, President Hoover visited lumber company officials but refused to meet with Save the Redwoods League representatives. He didn't believe federal money should be used to establish redwood parks. He did, however, believe that the California state government should act to protect the trees. In a 1921 telegram to California Governor W.D. Stephens, then Secretary of Commerce Hoover wrote, “As a California citizen. I do hope you may see your way to completion of the act providing for the purchase of the Northern California redwoods. They are indeed one of the glories of California. I do not believe we would ever forgive ourselves if we see their destruction.”
Gifford Pinchot, the first Director of the U.S. Forest Service, is second from left.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: HCC Photos Collection, Humboldt State University Library
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Women's Federation Hearthstone - 1933
Located in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, the Julia Morgan-designed Hearthstone commemorates the women’s clubs in Humboldt County who convinced the California Federation of Women’s Clubs to purchase acreage of old growth redwoods. The clubs campaigned for two decades to save the redwoods from logging.
Women’s civic clubs provided an avenue for influence when women were mostly excluded from business and politics. They often encouraged women’s interest in nature, particularly after 1900 when new technologies increased logging in Humboldt. In February, 1907, the Humboldt Times lamented the loss of the forests, stating “the uncouth hand of man scars and gashes the beautiful face of nature in Humboldt” while “the smooth and gentle hand of woman can touch the wound and heal them.”
This pair of photos is located outside the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: California Federation of Women's Clubs, Fresno
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Newton Drury and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. at the Rockefeller Forest - 1965
Newton Drury is probably the most significant figure in the historical protection of California’s coastal redwoods. Not long after graduating from UC Berkeley, he was asked to manage the Save the Redwoods League where he served as either Executive Director, President, or Chairman for a total of 39 years. Under his leadership, the League preserved nearly 50,000 acres of coast redwoods and the Calaveras Grove of giant sequoias.
Drury also helped create the state park system in California and became its Land Acquisitions Officer. During his tenure, the state park system grew to 150 parks, beaches, and historic monuments. In 1940, he became Director of the National Park System and was able to protect the parks from being used as training sites for mountain warfare and against logging for sitka spruce for its use in airplane construction.
John D Rockefeller, Jr, was only 11 years old in 1926 when he first visited the old-growth redwoods in what is now Humboldt Redwoods State Park. He had a conversation with Newton Drury about what it would take to save the ancient trees. This talk inspired the Rockefellers’ first and subsequent gifts to purchase over 9,000 acres of timberland with matching contributions from the state. The “Rockefeller Forest” was so named in 1952 and is the largest contiguous stand of old-growth coast redwoods in the world.
This pair of photos is located outside the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: Philbrook Photo; Save-the-Redwoods League photograph collection, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Boy Scout Tree - ca. 1930s
The 5.6 mile (round trip) Boy Scout Tree Trail was built by Boy Scouts from Crescent City in the 1930s after a scout leader discovered it. The twin trunks of the tree are 240 feet tall and 23 feet in diameter.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Save-the-Redwoods League photograph collection, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Gold Bluffs Seashore - ca. 1960s
Gold strikes throughout the redwood region were common in the 1850s and 60s. Gold Bluffs Beach was said to be covered with bright and yellow gold. Some called it the “richest diggings in California”. In fact, separating the gold flakes from the black sands was prohibitively expensive and the reputation of the beach as a place to get rich diminished quickly.
In 1963, the California Highway Commission proposed an expansion of the Redwood Highway to a four-lane freeway. The California State Parks, Save-the-Redwoods League, and conservationists opposed this idea so the Division of Highways proposed running the freeway along the 9 mile stretch of Gold Bluffs Beach. After much debate, this proposal was shelved and a by-pass was built outside the park to its east. The original two-lane roadway was renamed the Newton B. Drury Parkway at the suggestion of the Save-the-Redwoods League, “to honor the man most responsible for the purchase and protection of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.”
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: David Yule; Save-the-Redwoods League photograph collection, UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Lady Bird Johnson Grove Dedication - 1969
Redwood National Park was established in 1968 to preserve significant examples of ancient coast redwood forests and the streams and seashores that they are associated with. It incorporated 58,000 acres, including nine miles of Redwood Creek in the lower one-third of the watershed. One floodplain within that corridor contains what were at that time the tallest measured trees in the world, the Tall Trees Grove. This nine-mile corridor however was only a half-mile wide, providing only a quarter-mile buffer of protection on either side of Redwood Creek. The remainder of the 280 square mile Redwood Creek watershed remained in private ownership, primarily by timber companies.
At the dedication ceremony of the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, attended by the current president, Richard Nixon, the past president, Lyndon Johnson, the future president and then Governor of California Ronald Reagan, as well as Congressman Don Clausen (who authored the House bill to establish Redwood National Park), Lady Bird Johnson said, “Conservation is indeed a bipartisan business because all of us have the same stake in this magnificent continent. All of us have the same love for it and the same feeling that it is going to belong to our children and grandchildren and their grandchildren.”
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: David Swanlund; UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Protest at Dedication of Lady Bird Johnson Grove - 1969
After Redwood National Park was established, logging continued at the margins of the park. Road building and log skidding disrupted natural hydrologic patterns. During heavy rains, erosion was accelerated and sediment from denuded slopes poured downslope filling pools, burying stream habitat, and threatening to destroy the spawning habitat for salmon and kill the root systems of the ancient redwoods that remained.
After scientific studies and pressure from concerned citizens and environmental organizations, the federal government agreed that further protection was necessary for the irreplaceable resources of the recently established park. In 1978, the United States Congress expanded the park boundaries to include areas upslope of the narrow nine-mile section described in the previous photo. The Redwood Expansion Act of 1978 provided funding and directed the park to initiate and develop a watershed restoration program which is described next.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: Martin Litton; Redwood National Park Archives
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Watershed Restoration Program A400 #10 LLB (Looking at the Left Bank) - 2008
Truck roads and skid-roads were a primary contributor of excessive erosion and sedimentation to Redwood Creek. The roads that the timber companies built were generally designed to achieve the extraction of the planned harvest area at the lowest cost, without regard to long-term maintenance or environmental impacts. Haul truck roads without proper drainage can become saturated and cause landslides; where roads cross streams without adequate drainage structures, they can become plugged, saturated, and fail directly into the stream. The so-called skid roads, used by bulldozers to drag logs on steep slopes to the main roads, became depressions that would carry surface flow to create a new, unnatural drainage network. A key restoration strategy, therefore, was the removal of logging roads.
Note the arrow pointing to a stump behind the excavator’s bucket in the 2008 photo. This is the removal of a road stream crossing in action. The excavator has uncovered, and is removing, a log that was buried parallel to the stream flow during original road construction. This technique, known as a “Humboldt Crossing”, was a common practice for building logging roads over small streams in the 1950s to the early 1970s. In the 2022 photo, NPS geologist Greg Gibbs is standing next to that same stump, barely visible behind all the alder despite wearing an orange safety-vest. The Alder is 100-percent volunteer, natural revegetation; nothing was planted here after the road was removed.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: Greg Gibbs; Redwood National Park Watershed Restoration
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Watershed Restoration Program A400 #10 LDS (Looking Down Stream) - 2008
The Redwood Expansion Act of 1978 added 30,000 acres of logged lands to Redwood National Park and established 33,000 acres of private land upstream as a Park Protection Zone. The Act also directed the National Park Service to develop a watershed restoration program.
Early experimentation determined that a minimalist approach to control erosion would not be sufficient in the face of major storms. Such events occur with increasingly regularity as the planet warms. Scientists realized that removing the erosion threat from the landscape was a race against time and the use of heavy equipment to mitigate the threats was necessary.
Bulldozers and excavators were brought in to remove stream-crossings, re-expose the original streambeds, take out road fill, and uncover the original topsoil. The land was recontoured to mimic its original shape, woody debris was scattered to stabilize the hillsides and reduce erosion, and organic matter was added to the soil.
Notice in the 2008 photo that the old road corridor mimics the shape of the surrounding hillslope, and the logs are spread over the finished surface. This logging road crossed the stream where the bulldozer is working in the photo. Alder, ferns, huckleberry, and some small fir has revegetated the disturbance created by the 2008 restoration.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: Greg Gibbs; Redwood National Park Watershed Restoration
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Watershed Restoration Program A400 #12 LUS (Looking Up Stream) - 2008
240 linear feet of the stream in this 2008 photo was buried beneath twenty feet of collapsing fill and large wood at the downstream end, and the upstream 90 feet consisted of fine sediment up to twelve feet deep. Note the yellow arrow pointing at the snag still visible in the 2022 photo.
The National Park Service mission to preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and NPS values for future generations is usually achieved by management within the park boundary. Redwood National Park is different than most national parks in that honoring the NPS mission required the acquisition and restoration of property adjacent to the park. Consequently, understanding the interactions between land use and watershed processes became the major focus in the effort to achieve the NPS mission by minimizing the impacts and threat to park resources from previous land use within and outside the park.
The “volunteer” Alder that has naturally populated the restored areas is a “pioneer” species, able to establish a presence in areas that won’t support most other species. It fixes nitrogen well and helps fertilize even the poorest soils, initiating the succession of other plant species, including Sequoia Sempervirens (Coast Redwood).
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: Greg Gibbs; Redwood National Park Watershed Restoration
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
Watershed Restoration Program A400 #16 LUS - 2009
The excavator in the 2009 photo is removing logs from a collapsed “stringer” bridge that consisted of several logs laid down across the stream, perpendicular to stream flow. Over time, the bridge collapsed, causing sediment to collect to a depth of eight feet upstream of the crossing. Note that the stump visible in both photos (yellow arrow) is higher in the 2022 photo. This is because the streambed, and thus photo point, is significantly lower after the crossing was completely removed (2022 photo).
The Redwood Expansion Act of 1978 was the most expensive land acquisition in National Park Service history because it included not only the purchase of land, but the timber companies were also paid the revenues they would lose from future harvests. However, the Act has proven to be an engine of economic development for the Redwood region, from Ferndale to Crescent City. Not only does the National Park and its partner state parks bring tourism, but the restoration projects hire local lumbermen, timber contractors, and Native American tribal members.
The watershed restoration effort at Redwood National Park has become more holistic with its monitoring and interventions at an ecosystem level. For example, forest management of logged lands has become integrated with road removal under our newest paradigm, Redwoods Rising. The restoration work is a showcase of the cultural, economic, and ecological benefits that can accrue when humans repair the damage we have caused to our ecological systems.
This pair of photos is located within the boundaries of Redwood National and State Parks.
Left image
Credit: Photographer: Greg Gibbs; Redwood National Park Watershed Restoration
Right image
Credit: NPS/Ted Barone
|
