50 free Redwood National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Redwood National Park trivia quiz covers the northern California coast where the tallest trees on Earth grow, and the unusual partnership of one national park and three state parks that protects nearly half of all the old-growth coast redwood left in the world. It ranges across Hyperion and its rivals, the biology of a tree that drinks fog and shrugs off fire, Fern Canyon and its Jurassic Park cameo, the 37 miles of wild coast, Roosevelt elk and the earthquake-prone geology. There is plenty of history too: the Yurok, Tolowa and Chilula peoples, Jedediah Smith's 1828 trek, the Gold Rush logging boom, the Save the Redwoods League's 60-year race with the sawmills, Lyndon Johnson's 1968 park, Jimmy Carter's expensive 1978 expansion, and UNESCO World Heritage status in 1980. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a Highway 101 road-trip game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Sequoia, Yosemite and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Redwood National Park is on the coast of which U.S. state?
California
It sits about 325 miles north of San Francisco in Del Norte and Humboldt counties.
Q 02Which species of tree is the park named for and built around?
Coast redwood
Its scientific name, Sequoia sempervirens, means roughly 'everlasting'; the giant sequoia of the Sierra is a different genus.
Q 03Roughly what share of remaining old-growth coast redwood do the Redwood parks protect?
45%
About 96 percent of the original old growth was logged; only around 3 percent could ever be saved, Olmsted concluded in 1927.
Q 04Which president signed the bill creating Redwood National Park in October 1968?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Five logging companies had formally objected in 1965, and the final bill was largely framed on the loggers' terms.
Q 05Which president signed the 1978 expansion that added 48,000 acres, much of it already logged?
Jimmy Carter
At hundreds of millions of dollars it was the most expensive land purchase Congress had ever approved.
Q 06How many state parks are jointly managed with the national park under the 1994 agreement?
Three
Del Norte Coast, Prairie Creek and a third named for a fur trapper; the state never handed them over as the NPS once assumed it would.
Q 07Which organisation, founded in 1918 by John Merriam and Boone and Crockett Club members, bought redwood groves?
Save the Redwoods League
By 1979 it had preserved 150,000 acres, nearly twice what the federal government managed to save by legislation.
Q 08Which landscape architect's 1927 survey picked the sites that became the three redwoods state parks?
Frederick Law Olmsted
He concluded only three percent of the state's redwoods could be preserved and recommended four areas for parks.
Q 09What is the name of the tallest known living tree on Earth, a coast redwood found in the park in 2006?
Hyperion
Helios, Icarus and Daedalus, all in the same park, are the second-, fourth- and fifth-tallest known trees.
Q 10Roughly how tall is the world's tallest tree, in the park?
About 380 feet
It is still growing: measured at 379.1 feet in 2006 and 381.3 feet in 2026.
Q 11Who discovered the world's tallest tree on August 25, 2006?
Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor
Stephen Sillett of Cal Poly Humboldt then verified its height with a laser range finder and a fibreglass tape.
Q 12What penalty did the NPS announce in 2022 for anyone who approaches the tallest tree?
Up to $5,000 and six months in jail
Trampling by visitors had killed the ferns around its base, so the whole area was closed.
Q 13Roughly how old is the tallest tree estimated to be?
600 to 800 years
Q 21Which greenery-carpeted ravine in Prairie Creek Redwoods was a location for The Lost World: Jurassic Park?
Fern Canyon
Its 50-foot walls are draped in five kinds of fern whose ancestors date to the Carboniferous.
Q 22Which stream runs through the floor of the park's famous fern-walled ravine?
Home Creek
The half-mile loop starts near Gold Bluffs Beach and connects to the James Irvine Trail.
Q 23Which fur trapper led the first known European-American party through the redwoods in 1828?
Jedediah Smith
He and nineteen companions traced the Trinity, Smith and Klamath rivers to the coast near Requa; a state park now bears his name.
It sprouted while the valley's original Athabaskan-speaking people still lived along Redwood Creek.
Q 14Which Greek mythological figure is the tallest tree named after?
A Titan
Its neighbours keep the theme: Helios, Icarus and Daedalus.
Q 15What was 'Tall Tree' in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, long thought the tallest before its top died?
A 367.8-foot redwood
So many visitors stood on its base that the soil packed hard, and its top 10 feet died in the 1970s and fell in the 1990s.
Q 16Roughly what portion of a coast redwood's annual water comes from fog?
About 40%
Summer fog matters more to the trees' health than rainfall, which is why they never grow more than 50 miles from the sea.
Q 17Why are coast redwoods so resistant to fire?
Thick bark with no resin
Bark on the trunk can be a foot thick, though near the crown it may be less than an inch.
Q 18How old is the oldest known coast redwood?
About 2,200 years
Claims of older redwoods are wrong; the bristlecone pine holds the age record among trees.
Q 19Which endangered seabird nests high on redwood branches in the parks?
Marbled murrelet
It is one of 28 federally listed or candidate species that use the parks.
Q 20Which large mammals, restored from near extinction, are the parks' most easily seen big animals?
Roosevelt elk
Herds graze at Elk Prairie and on Gold Bluffs Beach, and rutting bulls in the fall are worth keeping a distance from.
Q 24Which Native American nation, with about 55 villages, was the park area's most populous in 1852?
Yurok
The NPS still manages about 1,400 acres of park land inside the Yurok Indian Reservation.
Q 25Which people, who saw the redwoods as gifts from a creator, lived along Redwood Creek until the 1860s?
Chilula
By 1919 virtually all Chilula had died or been absorbed into other tribes.
Q 26Native peoples split redwood into planks to build houses and what else?
Boats
Yurok dugout canoes were carved from single redwood logs.
Q 27Which 1848 event brought the settlers and loggers who transformed the redwood coast?
The California Gold Rush
Gold on the Trinity River in 1850 pulled the crowds north, and most mining companies soon became lumber companies.
Q 28The 1881 invention of what logging machine spawned the practice of clearcutting in the redwoods?
The steam donkey
Before that, teams of six or twelve oxen dragged logs out, and two men with a crosscut saw got through about a foot of trunk an hour.
Q 29In what year did UNESCO name the parks a World Heritage Site?
1980
They were made an International Biosphere Reserve in 1983, a status the U.S. withdrew from in 2017.
Q 30How long is the stretch of coastline the parks preserve?
37 miles
Redwoods stay a mile or two back from the surf to avoid salt air; Sitka spruce takes the front row.