50 Fun Facts About Redwoods

The world's tallest known living tree, a California coast redwood, bears which Greek Titan's name?

Hyperion grows in a remote corner of Redwood National Park, and the area around it was closed in 2022 after visitors trampled the ground at its base.

Which giant sequoia in California's Giant Forest is the largest living single-stem tree on Earth?

General Sherman was only confirmed as the biggest in 1931, after a comparison with a rival sequoia made wood volume the standard for ranking trees.

Coast redwoods can drink through their leaves and bark, absorbing which Pacific weather feature?

Summer fog also drips from the needles to the forest floor, where the roots take it up during California's long dry season.

Which activist spent 738 days up a California redwood named Luna to stop loggers felling the tree?

Julia Butterfly Hill came down in December 1999 only after Pacific Lumber agreed to spare the tree and a buffer of forest around it.

The Ewoks' forest moon of Endor was filmed among California's redwoods for which Star Wars movie?

Return of the Jedi shot its Endor forest scenes in the far north of the state, including Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park.

Rare albino redwoods have white needles and feed off a parent tree because they lack which pigment?

Chlorophyll is what lets a tree make food from sunlight; albinos of other conifers die young, but a redwood albino can live as a parasite on its green parent.

The stump of the Discovery Tree, a giant sequoia felled at Calaveras, was turned into what?

A dance floor was the stump's new job: on July 4, 1853, thirty-two people danced cotillions on it, and a bowling alley was later built on the fallen trunk.

Which president signed an 1864 act protecting Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove sequoias?

Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in the middle of the Civil War, handing the valley and the grove to California to be kept as a state park.

The dawn redwood was known only from fossils until living trees were found in which country?

China's Hubei province holds most of the wild dawn redwoods, but seeds sent abroad in 1948 soon made the species a familiar park tree around the world.

Which American folk hero stands 49 feet tall at the Trees of Mystery redwood attraction?

Paul Bunyan has greeted drivers there since 1961 beside a 35-foot Babe the Blue Ox; the first statue, built in 1946, was destroyed by a single winter's rain.

Wild coast redwoods grow almost entirely in California, plus a few groves in which other state?

Oregon's redwoods stand along the Chetco River just over the state line, the northern tip of a narrow coastal strip that runs south to Big Sur.

Giant sequoias grow naturally only in scattered groves on the western slopes of which mountain range?

Sierra Nevada groves stayed little known to settlers until 1852, when a grizzly hunter stumbled on one and his find soon drew tourists.

Which redwood national monument north of San Francisco was created from land donated by William Kent?

Muir Woods was Kent's answer to a water company that wanted to dam the canyon, and he insisted the monument carry a naturalist's name, not his own.

Which coast redwood in Leggett, California, has a tunnel cut through the trunk for cars to drive through?

Chandelier Tree is named for the huge limbs that branch out 100 feet up; the tunnel was cut in the late 1930s to lure drivers off the Redwood Highway.

By a popular but unproven account, the name Sequoia honors Sequoyah, creator of which nation's script?

Cherokee is the language Sequoyah gave a syllabary, but the botanist who coined Sequoia in 1847 left no reason for the name, so the link is still argued over.

The coast redwood is Sequoia sempervirens; what does the Latin species name sempervirens mean?

Evergreen fits, and the Latin can also be read as everlasting, apt for a tree that regrows from its own stump when it is cut down.

Giant sequoia cones can stay closed for 20 years; which natural event opens them and clears ground for seedlings?

A wildfire dries the cones open and burns back the shade-loving rivals that would otherwise crowd out young sequoias.

Which knobbly woody growth on a coast redwood holds dormant buds that can sprout into whole new trees?

Burl wood is valuable enough that thieves have chainsawed the growths off ancient trees in Redwood National and State Parks.

Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park was a filming location for which Spielberg dinosaur film?

The Lost World began shooting there in September 1996, a spot picked because research suggested dinosaurs lived in forests like these, not tropical jungle.

A socialist colony logging near today's Sequoia National Park renamed the largest tree after which thinker?

Karl Marx was the Kaweah Colony's choice, but the name did not outlast the colony, which broke up in 1892 after the national park was created; the tree got its old name back.

In 1945, delegates drafting which body's charter honored Franklin D. Roosevelt in a redwood grove near San Francisco?

United Nations delegates gathered in Cathedral Grove on May 19, 1945, weeks after the president's death, and left a plaque there in his memory.

Which president's wife has a grove in Redwood National Park named for her, dedicated by Richard Nixon in 1969?

Lady Bird Johnson earned the honor for her work as First Lady to preserve the country's natural resources; her grove stands just north of Orick.

Redwood National and State Parks earned which international designation in 1980 for their rare ecosystem?

World Heritage Site status covers the national park and three state parks, which together protect almost half of the old-growth coast redwood forest left on Earth.

Before the National Park Service existed, which Black Army regiments patrolled Sequoia National Park?

Buffalo Soldiers were sent because the young park had no money to hire civilians, and their road and trail work helped shape the modern park ranger's job.

A giant sequoia felled for New York's American Museum of Natural History was named for which humorist?

Mark Twain's namesake took 13 days to bring down in 1891, and its stump still stands in Kings Canyon, where fifty men once posed on top of it.

The General Noble Tree, a giant sequoia cut into 46 sections, was shown at an 1893 world's fair in which city?

Chicago fairgoers doubted that a tree so large could be real and nicknamed the exhibit the California Hoax; what was left behind is still called the Chicago Stump.

Which president proclaimed the General Grant Tree in Kings Canyon the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926?

Calvin Coolidge gave the giant sequoia its title, and thirty years later Eisenhower made it a national shrine to the war dead, the only living thing so honored.

The largest unbroken old-growth redwood forest, in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, bears which family's name?

Rockefeller Forest stands on land that once belonged to the Pacific Lumber Company and was only added to the park in the 1930s.

Which scenic road, a former stretch of US 101, runs beside the Eel River through Humboldt Redwoods State Park?

Avenue of the Giants links tiny towns such as Myers Flat and Weott, and each year runners race a marathon along it.

Which conservation group, founded in 1918, has helped create dozens of California's redwood parks and reserves?

Save the Redwoods League was started by three men shocked by the logging they saw on a 1917 trip, and it works by buying groves outright.

The dawn redwood, unlike the two California redwoods, does what at the end of every growing season?

The dawn redwood sheds its needles each autumn, a habit thought to have helped its ancestors through months of polar darkness in the far north.

Despite standing over 300 feet tall, coast redwoods anchor themselves with what kind of root system?

Shallow, spreading roots run out sideways rather than down, and when a flood buries the base in silt, the tree grows a second root system higher up.

Which redwood forest creature is the mascot of UC Santa Cruz?

The banana slug's Pacific species is the second-largest land slug in the world, and UC Santa Cruz students voted it in as their mascot.

Which threatened bird of old-growth redwood and fir forests became an icon of the West Coast timber wars?

The spotted owl's northern subspecies was listed as threatened in 1990, and a year later a court order halted logging in the national forests where it lived.

Large-scale logging of California's redwoods took off in the wake of which event?

The Gold Rush drew hundreds of thousands of people to California, and when the diggings thinned out, most mining companies turned into lumber businesses.

Giant redwoods in the Grove of Titans are named Aragorn, Beregond and Elwing after which author's characters?

J. R. R. Tolkien's heroes share the grove with trees called Lost Monarch and Screaming Titans, and the location was kept quiet for years to protect it.

Ice-age fossil bark shows coast redwoods once grew as far south as which California city?

Los Angeles had redwoods during the last ice age: bark preserved in the La Brea Tar Pits is some 25,000 to 40,000 years old, while today's southernmost wild grove is far up the coast near Big Sur.

Which Alfred Hitchcock thriller sends James Stewart and Kim Novak walking among California's coast redwoods?

Vertigo's redwood scene is set at a national monument near San Francisco but was actually shot in a state park farther south, in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Yosemite's Wawona Tunnel Tree, a drive-through giant sequoia, stood until 1969; what finally brought it down?

A heavy snow load on the crown finished what the 1881 tunnel began: the cut had weakened the 2,300-year-old tree, which still lies where it fell.

What name is given to the circle of young coast redwoods that sprouts around a dead parent stump?

A fairy ring is the old tree living on: the sprouts rise from its root crown without seed, and each soon grows roots of its own.

Which small seabird flies inland from the Pacific to nest on mossy limbs high in old-growth redwoods?

The marbled murrelet nests alone on a mossy limb instead of in a cliff colony like its relatives, and where people gather, crows and jays follow and raid its chicks.

Which small mammal helps scatter giant sequoia seeds by gnawing the fleshy green scales off young cones?

The Douglas squirrel, also called the chickaree, works the cones all year, and a tiny longhorn beetle that bores into them is the trees' other seed-spreading helper.

Which redwood park in the Santa Cruz Mountains, established in 1902, is California's oldest state park?

Big Basin was saved by campaigners who formed the Sempervirens Club on a trip to the forest, and in 2020 lightning-sparked fires burned 97 percent of the park.

A redwood state park near Crescent City is named for which explorer, the first American to reach California overland?

Jedediah Smith made the trek in 1826, and no explorer of European descent is known to have probed the redwood coast's interior before he did in 1828.

Which Native American people of California's north coast built plank houses and canoes only from fallen redwoods?

The Yurok regard redwoods as living beings, and in 2024 the tribe agreed to co-manage ancestral land with the National Park Service.

Which heritage railroad carries passengers through redwood forest from Fort Bragg on California's Mendocino coast?

The Skunk Train owes its nickname to the gas-powered railcars added in 1925, which locals joked they could smell before they could see.

Which botanist, the first scientist to enter the redwood canopy, features in Richard Preston's The Wild Trees?

Stephen Sillett shoots an arrow over a high branch to set his first rope, then hauls himself up with harnesses and pulleys.

Which tunneled giant sequoia, cut in the 1880s to rival one in Yosemite, shattered in a January 2017 storm?

Pioneer Cabin Tree got its name from a hollow, lightning-burnt trunk with compartments like a log cabin, its scorched core serving as the chimney.

Which Humboldt Redwoods State Park tree was ranked the world's tallest before a 2006 find in Redwood National Park?

Stratosphere Giant was found along Bull Creek in 2000 by Chris Atkins, who went on to co-discover the even taller tree that took its title.

Which compound, concentrated in redwood bark and wood, helps the trees shrug off insects, fungus and rot?

Tannic acid and other defensive chemicals work so well that no insect is known to be capable of killing a healthy coast redwood.