Now hold on a minute before you get too comfortable in all this green, because I want you to picture this road the way it nearly was. Name's Ranger Boone Merrick, and I'll be telling you the tales along the Avenue.
Roll the clock back to nineteen seventeen. The redwood coast is being cut down as fast as steel and steam can manage it. There's a fortune standing in these valleys — a single big tree might frame a dozen houses — and the mills are working their way up the Eel River, flat by flat, taking everything. And in that year, three men come driving up this very valley on a rough dirt track: a paleontologist, a museum director, and a conservationist. Grown, serious, scientific men. And when they get out among these trees, they are simply undone by them. Then they drive a few miles on and come to the cut — the stumps, the slash, the mud, the silence where a thousand-year-old forest had been standing the year before. And what were those giants being cut FOR? Grape stakes. Shingles. Railroad ties. Two thousand years of growing, sawed up into fence posts.
And here's the turn. Those three men stood in that wreckage and understood something the whole country had missed: nobody was coming to save this. There was no law, no park, no plan. If these trees were going to survive, somebody was going to have to BUY them, tree by tree, acre by acre, in a straight footrace against the saws. So in nineteen eighteen they founded the Save-the-Redwoods League, and they went and begged for money. Not from the government — from ordinary people. And the money came in: a few dollars from a schoolteacher, a hundred from a garden club, a fortune from a millionaire who'd been driven out to see it. They'd buy a grove one week and the mill would move into the next valley the following week. It was that close. That's what those little wooden signs with names on them are, all up and down this road — each one a patch of forest somebody paid for. So when you look at these trees, understand: they are not here because they were lucky. They are here because a handful of stubborn people got out their checkbooks and stood between a thousand years of growing and a saw blade — and won, barely, by about one valley.