The Avenue of the Giants: Racing the Chainsaw

The trees on either side of this road are the reason the road exists.

By nineteen eighteen, enough of the Humboldt County redwood forests had been logged that anyone who could do arithmetic could see what was coming. The mills were working faster than any legislative process. Letters to Sacramento moved slowly. Trees fell quickly. The old-growth coast redwood was not going to protect itself.

Three scientists at the University of California, Henry Fairfield Osborn, John C. Merriam, and Madison Grant, founded the Save the Redwoods League that year with a method that was genuinely new: do not wait for the government to act. Buy the groves directly, acre by acre, and donate them to the state park system. Race the chainsaw. Get title to the land before the timber company can get its equipment onto it.

The method worked. On August sixth, nineteen twenty-one, the League dedicated its first major preserved grove, and Humboldt Redwoods State Park was established. By the late nineteen twenties, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had contributed two million dollars toward the acquisition of the Dyerville Flat stands. The corridor of old-growth that you are driving through now, what later became known as the Avenue of the Giants, was assembled grove by grove, donation by donation, across the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties while timber operations cleared adjacent stands.

The method the League invented, direct private land purchase rather than legislative advocacy, became the template for the Nature Conservancy and dozens of subsequent land trusts across the country.

What surrounds you is what they saved before the chainsaw caught up. Second-growth forest begins where the League ran out of money or time. The boundary between the two is still legible from the road.