The Boom, and What It Took — a stop on the Avenue of the Giants.
You're driving through the middle of what was, for about a century, one of the most valuable industrial resources in America — and it's worth being honest about that rather than tutting at it.
Redwood is a remarkable timber: straight-grained, light, easy to work, and naturally so full of tannin that it resists rot and insects almost indefinitely. Fence posts cut in the eighteen hundreds are still standing. San Francisco was largely built out of it, twice — once before the earthquake and fire of nineteen-oh-six, and again after.
The scale was staggering. A single big tree could frame a dozen houses. The mills ran on steam, then diesel, and the technology kept improving faster than the forest could hide from it — oxen, then steam donkeys, then railroads, then trucks and chainsaws. After the Second World War, when America needed millions of new houses very fast, the cut went vertical.
And the people doing it were not villains. They were loggers and mill hands in company towns, doing brutally dangerous work, and the timber industry built every community along this river. When it went, it took the jobs with it, and that wound is still felt around here — which is worth remembering before anyone gets sentimental in one direction or the other.
Of roughly two million acres of old-growth redwood, about five percent is left. You are driving through the largest single piece of that remainder.