Rockefeller Forest, reached via Bull Creek Flats Road — the largest contiguous old-growth coast redwood forest remaining on earth.
Just north of Founders Grove, a road turns off west toward Bull Creek — and if you have an extra hour, that turn leads to the crown jewel of the entire redwood world. Rockefeller Forest is the largest unbroken stand of old-growth coast redwood left anywhere on the planet — around ten thousand acres of trees that have never been cut, several of them among the tallest trees ever measured. It exists because in the nineteen twenties John D. Rockefeller Junior was brought out here to see what was being lost, and he wrote a check — about two million dollars, matched by the state, an enormous fortune then — and by nineteen thirty-one that bought better than nine thousand acres of Dyerville flats out from under the lumber company. And here's the detail I love: Rockefeller refused to have it named for him. For twenty years it was simply the Bull Creek–Dyerville Forest; they only put his name on it in nineteen fifty-one. The road is narrow and lovely; the Big Trees Area at the end has a flat loop trail. If you can spare the time, go. If not, know that it's back there, growing quietly, because somebody paid to keep it.
One more thing about Bull Creek, because it taught this park a hard lesson. The giants down on those flats were protected — but the ridges ABOVE them weren't, and they got clearcut. So when the big floods came in the fifties and sixties, the bare slopes shed their soil, the creek jammed with logs, and it undercut and toppled hundreds of old-growth giants that had stood a thousand years and were supposedly safe. The park had to go buy the whole upper watershed to stop it. You cannot save the grove, it turns out, without saving the ridge above it. And the creek's older name belongs to the Sinkyone people, whose country this is — they called it Lolangkok, and their descendants are still here.