Founders Grove — a flat, easy half-mile loop trail among giant old-growth redwoods, including the fallen Dyerville Giant.
If you take only one walk on this entire drive, take this one. Founders Grove is on your right, and the loop trail is barely half a mile, flat, smooth, and easy enough for nearly anyone. Park and walk it. The grove is named for the founders of the Save-the-Redwoods League, the people who started buying these groves out from under the saws back in nineteen eighteen, and the Founders Tree here stands about three hundred and forty feet tall. What the trail does that a car window never can is give you the SILENCE — the light coming down green and dim through three hundred feet of canopy, the sorrel like clover on the floor, the sound of your own footsteps going soft on the duff. And lying on the ground in that grove is the most astonishing thing in the park: a fallen giant. Go stand at its root wall, and let Boone tell you what happened the night it came down.