Fire, Flood, and Why They Don't Die — a stop on the Avenue of the Giants.
Something you'll start noticing at every pull-out: big black hollows burned into the bases of these trees, some of them large enough to walk into and stand up. People call them goose pens, because settlers used to fence them off and keep poultry in them.
Those are fire scars, and the tree shrugged them off. Redwood bark is up to a foot thick, spongy, full of tannin, and — this is the key — it carries almost no flammable resin. Ordinary forest fire chars the outside and moves on. A redwood can burn on one side, wall the wound off with new growth, and carry on for another five hundred years. Some of these trees have survived dozens of fires. The fire actually helps them, by killing the competition that isn't fireproof.
Flood, the same story. Bury a redwood's trunk in six feet of silt and it grows a whole new root system upward into the fresh soil.
And they barely bother to die. Cut one down and the stump sprouts a ring of clones from dormant buds in the burl — which is why you'll see perfect CIRCLES of trees, all the same age. Those are fairy rings, and every tree in the circle is genetically identical, standing around the ghost of a parent that was cut a century ago.
Fire, flood, the axe. This tree has an answer for all three. What it has no answer for is a chainsaw and a market — which is the story of the next hundred years, and the reason this road exists.