Episode Guest
Patrick Taylor – Interpretation and Education Program Manager
Redwoods National and State Parks
Park Stats
- Where park is located – Crescent City, California
- Park # – 33
- Date Created – October 2, 1968
- President when park was created – Lyndon B Johnson
- Size of the park – 138,999 acres
- Lowest Elevation – sea level
- Highest Elevation – 3,262 feet – Coyote Peak
- Number of visitors last year – 622,883 in 2024, closer to 2 million including all of RNSP
- Field Notes:
- The park is made of 71,715 acres of federal land and 60,268 of state park land.
- Old-growth forest: 38,982 acres (19,640 federal; 19,342 state)
- Tallest Redwood is currently 379 feet
- 40-100 inches of rainfall a year
- On a visit you may see California Sea Lions, Roosevelt Elk, Salamanders & Banana Slugs along with 66 mammal species, 280 species of birds, 188 species of marine and fresh water fish, 621 native plant species
Speed Round
What is your earliest park memory?
Lehman Cave at Great Basin in National Park. My family about once a year would do a cross Nevada road trip on Highway 50, known as the Loneliest Road in America. And there’s not a lot to stop and do there. And so that’s where we would always stop.
What made you love the parks?
I grew up not. With a family that sought out park experiences. So we did go camping once or twice a year. Usually just like local county parks, it was a lot of junk food. Your car 10 feet away from you. There was no big ethics lessons about leave, no trace. But what it was just having fun and realizing outdoors is a fun place we can enjoy. It’s not something scary. So I think that’s what initially turned the key in me. Then learning more about the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and the Park Service. The Park Service mission just resonated with me a little bit more than the others did.
What is your favorite thing about Redwoods National and State Parks?
How accessible it is, and I don’t. I don’t necessarily mean it for like wheelchair users or people harder or low vision, but what I mean by accessible, which also applies to some of those groups, is you don’t have to go on an epic hike or ride a shuttle bus or figure out this complicated advanced reservation system or be packed in with thousands of people.
To have this incredible life changing experience. We do have some reservations and other things, so I don’t get people too excited about it. But you can show up with very little planning, not knowing where you’re going or what you wanna do. Talk to a Ranger in 10 minutes later, be having this experience that you’ll tell people about the rest of your life.
What is your favorite thing to do at Redwoods National and State Parks?
Show it to people for the first time. Seeing people’s reaction to the trees just rekindle something in me that helps me remember my first experience and how amazing it was. But more specifically, if somebody’s I’m going there, what’s the one thing I should do? We talked about this earlier. Hike on the beach. I then walk, I’m sorry, hike in the Redwood forest. I then go walk on the beach.
What park have you yet to visit but is on your bucket list and why?
I’ve not been to Alaska at all, broadly speaking, all the Alaska Parks, but probably Kenai Fjord specifically to go out and see the glaciers and the whales.
What are three must-haves you pack for a park visit?
National Park Service app, as I mentioned.
Flexibility. I know that’s not a physical thing, but there is almost zero chance you’re gonna show up at a national park and everything’s gonna go exactly as you want it. The campground’s gonna be full or you’re gonna have missed. The bus or the last ranger program already went for the day. So showing up with that vision of what you want to happen, but flexibility and how you get to that experience.
And then treats. So I have five daughters and we quickly learned that if the kids aren’t having fun, mom and dad don’t have fun. And it’s amazing what treats can solve. You’re waiting for the sun to set or set up your tent or whatever it is.
What is your favorite campfire activity?
It’s probably similar to a lot of people, but eating s’mores. And then our twist on it is listening to the Camp Monster podcast series. So it’s something that our kids really like listening to and gives mom and dad a break from being creative to listen to somebody else, tell them a story.
Tent, camper, or cabin?
At this point, we’re a camper family. I mentioned all the kids and the the tent wasn’t working out so well anymore, so we’ve been a camper for a little while, but we’ve experienced them all. They’re all amazing, and they’ve all got their place.
Hiking with or without trekking poles?
Here in Redwoods, typically without, and that’s because most of our hikes are not super long, nor do most of them have a whole lot of elevation gain or loss associated with them. But if I’m doing a long hike, then I bring the poles.
And what is your favorite trail snack?
It’s called Li Hing Mui dehydrated mangoes. So I lived in Hawaii for a few years and it’s this dehydrated, plump powder they put on dry fruit, and it’s incredible. It’s natural sugar, but I get to tell myself this is fruit, so I can eat as much as I want and not feel guilty about it.
What is the favorite animal sighting that you’ve had?
The California condor. So we talked about that before. It’s not a guarantee. If you come to Redwood, you’re gonna see California condor. In fact, most people do not. But if you go to the right places and look for ’em, and especially if you know the story behind how many people put in the work and what it means, not just to the natural environment, but also to the cultural significance of the tribes.
It’s just incredible to see a living, breathing animal that’s here. Because of what people have done and sacrificed to bring it back.
What is your favorite sound in the parks?
Silence, which sounds weird, but I’ve worked at a couple of places that are very silent. So I worked at Death Valley National Park and it can be really quiet there. I’ve worked at cave parks where it can be really quiet when you go down inside there, but the silence here in the redwoods is different. So when you’re deep in the old growth forest, if there’s not other people around and you really stop.
It is surprising how quiet it is ’cause there’s so much plant life around you. You would expect it to just be teeming with bugs and birds and everything. And it is, there’s a lot of life there, but redwoods are not super conducive for insects to eat. And so there’s not as many insects, hence not as many birds and other predators coming after those insects, maybe as you’d expect.
So sometimes I’ve been in the redwood forest. You can’t hear anything, but it’s like a very soft silence. Not maybe the hard silence of a cave or a death valley. It’s just this very calm oh, there’s nothing. And how often in our life is there Nothing
What is the greatest gift the parks give to us?
A sense of place and belonging. So I think we all want to feel big and important and relevant, but I feel that there’s this weird inverse relationship that when we come to parks especially the big. Natural parks. You see a giant redwood in a lush forest or you see the Milky way over a dark desert park or the ocean from the coast, and you feel very small.
But I never feel a deeper sense of connection to the world around me when I’m doing that. So I think the gift of Parks gives us is it really helps cement the relationship we have, that we’re a part of the earth, not apart from the earth.
Show Notes & Links
- Redwoods National & State Park
- Save the Redwoods League
- California Department of Recreation
- Redwoods Park Conservancy
Episode Transcript
Missy Rentz:
We are headed to a park that is home to the world’s tallest trees, a spectacular seashore, bald eagles, California condors, whales, and more. Join me as we explore Redwoods, National and State Parks. I’m your host, Missy Rentz, and this is The Parks Podcast. In this episode, I’m excited to welcome Patrick Taylor, who is the Interpretation and Education program manager at Redwoods National and State Park. Patrick, welcome to The Parks Podcast
Patrick Taylor:
Yes. Thank you. Really excited to chat with you today.
Missy Rentz:
I am too.’cause I was at Redwoods this summer and I fell in love with it. So let me start with some park stats. The park is located in Crescent City, California. It was the 33rd National Park created on October 2nd, 1968 when Lyndon b Johnson was president of the United States. The park is 138,999 acres. Its lowest elevation is sea level, and the highest elevation is 3,262 feet, which is Coyote Peak in. 2024. There were close to 2 million visitors to the park and some interesting notes. The park is made up of 71,715 acres of federal land and 60,268 acres of state park land, the old growth forest. Makes up 38,982 acres. The tallest redwood is currently 379 feet. The park has between 40 and 100 inches of rainfall every year, which is mind blowing to me. On a visit, you may see California sea lions, Roosevelt, elk, salamanders, and banana slugs, along with. 33 mammal species, 280 species of birds, one hundred and eighty eighty eight species of marine and freshwater fish, and 621 native plant species. This park is mind blowing. It is beautiful. Okay, so let’s start with a question I usually ask, which is, why is it important that Redwoods National and State Park is part of the National Park system?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, so I think there’s two layers to that answer. The first one is very park specific. So people come from around the world to see experience the tallest trees. On the planet, and that’s within Redwood National and State Parks. And so walking through the old growth forest, seeing all the wildlife you just talked about, coming here for this experience is the first layer of why it’s important this park was preserved. It’s just a deep place of connection, of meaning. I’ve been fortunate to work in several national parks. In every park you work at, there’s people that love it and say, this was a great experience. I’m so glad I came. But this is the one where people seem to have this very deep kind of core connection with it, where they’re like, oh, something in me, turned on that I didn’t know was there. Somehow I feel like these trees are my friends, like things that we feel as like very fluffy, lots of times in the regular world. People just come here, accountants, teachers, whoever they might be, and just have this kind of deep connection with nature that I think we’re often, we often forget about. And a little later we can talk about like maybe why this park it’s a little easier to do that than some other parks. But that experience is very unique here and one of the reasons Redwood National and state parks is so important. The additional layer though is Redwood National Park specifically was created in 1968. It was expanded in 1978, and that expansion act is very important because it, it helped codify in federal law. What all national park service sites mean. So we often talk about national parks and there’s 60 plus proper national parks like Yosemite National Park, Olympic National Park, but there are hundreds of sites within the National Park Service. There’s presidential birth homes, there’s Civil War, historic sites, sea shores memorials. So there’s hundreds of these other sites and the Redwood Expansion Act, codified saying all of these sites, whether they’re a proper national park or not, are gonna be treated, operated and maintained the same way into the same standards. So again, for the Park service as a, as an agency, as an entity, the Redwood Expansion Act was very important In solidifying, we treat’em all the same, even though the proper name might be slightly different.
Missy Rentz:
And the other thing that I think is unique about this park, and we’ve said it several times, it’s a national and state park. Why and how in the world does that work?
Patrick Taylor:
That’s a great question. It’s we’re asked it pretty regularly and the way I describe it to people is it’s almost like an arranged marriage, in our modern sensibilities, we don’t probably deal with that too often, but we’ve all seen movies or read books about it. They can work. They can work amazing. And lots of times there’s a lot of benefits to’em. And I would say that’s the case in our partnership here with California Department of Parks and Recreation, or California State Parks. The state parks. That, that managed, the Redwoods in this area were here 50 plus years before the National Park was created. So they’ve been preserving and protecting some of these groves and forests since the 1920s. And as I mentioned, it wasn’t until the late sixties that Redwood National Park was created. When the National Park was created, though it was done in a somewhat it had a lot of controversies around it, but one of the controversies was they drew the boundaries to include the state parks. Even though the state parks were state parks, not national parks. And the idea as to my understanding is that the federal lawmakers thought the state parks California would just hand them over to National Park management and state parks said, no, we’re perfectly happy managing these ourselves. We like’em, they’re popular, they’re doing great. Why would we just give them to you? So for years, Redwood National Park existed. Independently, but in and around, surrounding a little bit, a lot of the state parks in the seventies, as I mentioned, expanded, so it surrounded them a little bit more. But for the visitor experience. And maybe more importantly, for the preservation of the redwood groves, the resources themselves. That wasn’t always the best way to do it if you had different policies just based off of an arbitrary line, drawn through a Redwood Grove, for example. So in 1994, we signed the co-management plan that says we’re gonna manage the resources within three state parks and the national park. For the betterment of the resources and for the visitor experience. And so since 1994, we’ve been co-managing them. And like any relationship it has its ups and its downs. It depends a lot on who the players are, what the politics within California state are, what the federal priorities of the moment might be. So it’s not always perfect, but by and large, everybody. Would agree that it is for the betterment of every, everybody, again, focusing primarily on the resources. Some of the things the co-management allows us to do is to, the best example is probably in our maintenance world. Most of the National Park service maintenance staff are and all the equipment, like the big tractors and trucks they have is based in the far north in Crescent City. A lot of the state park, they’re not even based within Redwood National and state parks because their district is quite a bit larger. That includes Parks south of Eureka. So a lot of their staff and supplies are either in Eureka, which is a couple hours south or even in parks. Further south from that. So if you can imagine there’s a state park owned road that needs to be regraded because of flooding or a giant tree falls across it here in Crescent City. It might take the state parks, days, weeks, maybe even months, to mobilize enough staff, people and equipment to get up here and deal with all of that. Which is crazy if we have an entire federal workforce two miles away from this road that’s now closed to the public. And so those, that’s just one example. But many ways the idea is we just share staff and we identify what’s the biggest problem and as much as we legally can ignore the uniform and solve the problem, if you walk into the visitor centers, there are five collectively across the Redwood National and state Parks, and at any one of them, you’re just as likely to see a National Park employee or a state park ploy, or even our nonprofit partner, Redwood Parks Conservancy, working there regardless of who technically owns the piece of land that it’s sitting on.
Missy Rentz:
I actually think I saw all three when I was visiting, so
Patrick Taylor:
Good, good.
Missy Rentz:
yeah. Okay, so California is very lucky to have big trees, and you always hear about redwoods and sequoias. What is the difference?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, so if I stick with kind of some family analogies, I would say Redwoods and Sequoias are siblings. Redwoods are, their scientific name is Sequoia Simper Byrons. So they are a Sequoia. And you can also say Sequoias are a redwood. So it gets a little tricky and nuanced when we talk about’em. I like to say they are siblings. One of them grew up to be a professional football player. It’s stocky and solid. The other one grew up to be a basketball player. It’s tall and thin.
Missy Rentz:
Brilliant. Brilliant.
Patrick Taylor:
They’re all really big trees. Even when we say, we like to tease each other, our counterparts that work at the other parks, and we’re like, oh, you tiny little sequoias that are still hundreds of feet tall and completely blow your mind. And they’re like, oh, you tiny trees, you’re just gonna push over in a breeze. Again they’re very similar. They have the similar tannins. They keep insects out. They grow to tremendous heights. They’re very resistant to almost everything the natural world can throw at’em in terms of windstorms and everything. But they do have their differences. Most often we associate with their physical build. So again, sequoias, the tallest sequoias are gonna be slightly smaller in height than the tallest redwoods and redwoods. Often have a slightly smaller base, although they can get wider than people expect, but they tend to taper and get narrow a lot faster. Whereas the Sequoia stay pretty broad and grow really tall. The Redwoods their name is Coastal Redwoods, which is a good indication of where they live right along the coast. They don’t go usually more than a couple miles inland. There’s a few random groves that work in a couple dozen miles maybe, but generally they’re within a couple miles of the coast and the sequoias are all in the Sierra Mountain range. A little bit further inland. Another good visual. Lots of times we see things like on social media or advertisements mislabeling them. If you see a Sequoia quite often, I don’t wanna say it’s standing by itself like it’s in a forest, but there’s usually not a tremendous amount of smaller vegetation crowding around it, especially the most iconic ones. It’s just this really big tree and you can see all of it, and it’s amazing. The redwoods that grow here tend to be crowded in a lot more with other vegetation, including their they can sprout their own roots and just start growing again. So you’ll have one big tree that’s got four or five other big trees, literally pushing it around right next to it sometimes. And so to a certain extent you lose. How big they are because there’s often so many of’em within the same view shed, and then down as at the lower, at the ground level, there’s a whole bunch of ferns and other plants that are growing around it. So if it’s really thick vegetation in a photo, it’s probably a redwood. And if it’s a little more cleared out, bare earth maybe it’s probably a Sequoia.
Missy Rentz:
I was noticing that because it’s very, so I had my dog with me. So the, when I the hike I went on was the road, I can’t remember the name of the road, but the gravel road in the park that dogs are allowed on. And it was very foresty. I was surprised having been to Sequoia and Kings Canyon. I was surprised how foresty it was. I also found it to be beautiful because, I I wish I had pictures to show you so you could tell me what it was, because it really does look like three trees are growing out of one root, sometimes.
Patrick Taylor:
Exactly. So they are very good. Redwoods are very good at reproducing. They do have cones and seeds people often think about, but they reproduce far more often just by resprouting out of their own trunk or from their roots that are spreading out around as well. And so the genetics, as you look at redwoods, you might see a grove and say oh, there’s 10 trees right there. And there’s a reasonable chance that’s actually the same tree, 10 different places at once. If you really get into the genetics of it. And so they’re incredibly resilient to know how to make the most of any living environment that they’re in. There’s a phenomenon that, that you can’t always see walking around. You have to really be looking for, but called angel rings, where you’ll have one big redwood that grows for centuries, so it’ll be a big tall one, and then around it, all of its offspring, which again might be genetic clones more or less. Start growing up around the parent tree. The parent tree eventually dies, rots away, and you have this kind of perfect concentric circle of redwood trees. So it is a little odd when you’re walking around feeling like, what happened right here? Why is there like a perfect circle around me? And it’s because those are usually the offspring of the tree that used to be in the middle.
Missy Rentz:
That’s pretty cool. That’s really neat. Okay, so we’ve talked about it. We’ve used the term old growth forest or old growth several times, and when I was researching and visiting, I saw it a lot. What is old? An old growth forest.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, I’m throwing off every time in the media. Now I hear somebody say the og. I’m like, oh, what’s the old growth? Yeah. So the old growth is essentially a forest that has not been logged. And one of the things that surprises people a lot about this park is the majority of Redwood national and state parks, two thirds of it was logged prior to it becoming a park. So most people that have been to a lot of national parks. There’s the mentality of preservation. So park is created and you lock it into that stage and say this is how we wanna preserve it forever. Redwoods had two thirds of it had already sail past the point of we don’t wanna preserve it the way it is because it’s been clear cut. Often replanted or grown back naturally in a very unhealthy, unnatural way. So a majority of our work here is actually spent doing restoration rather than preservation. And again, we can talk about that a little bit later on, but the old growth is the area that was never logged. That’s not to say it was never touched. People may have lived in the area. We know that the tribes around here did practice burning for centuries. Before we. All deemed wildfire was always a bad thing and stop it. So it’s not that there wasn’t some manmade controlling or manipulation of the environment, but it was never commercially logged.
Missy Rentz:
So how old would those trees be in the old growth forest?
Patrick Taylor:
They can be up to 2000 years old. So the Redwoods, and again, you can say this for the Sequoias as well. There’s not a lot of equipment that can drill through and test the age of the biggest DBH or diameter trees to find out exactly how old they are. But based off of the ones that have come down, they’re, there’s easily many, over a thousand to 2000 years old.
Missy Rentz:
And you’d kill it if you to find out for sure. You’d probably end up killing it. Yeah. And you don’t wanna do that. Okay. So currently the Redwoods are in a relatively small footprint in the country. Why do they only grow there where you are? Yeah.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah. So their range is essentially the Bay area up to the Oregon border. There is a very small grove into Oregon, but essentially we say it ends at the Oregon border. It may have been slightly bigger. 200 years ago, if we go back hundreds of thousands of years and, things change dramatically, but essentially for the coastal redwoods to, to thrive, they need a lot of water. And you mentioned how much we get here. Sometimes it feels like that all comes in a day, but they need tremendous amounts of water and they don’t just get it from rain, they get it from the fog. So essentially coastal redwoods are not gonna do anywhere where there isn’t regular amounts of fog, and that pretty much limits it to the coast at this time.
Missy Rentz:
And is it like, so I know when like forest fires hit the sequoias, they talk about. Maybe it’s like Sequoia, I might have this wrong, so correct me, sequoias can get stronger with fire. Are redwoods the same with the resistance? Is that the bark or whatever just gets stronger with some of these natural things that might attack oak trees or pine trees?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, that’s a good question. I haven’t heard anybody say they get stronger. Usually the language we use is just they’re resistant to it. And we, being on this high levels of rain, foggy coast, certainly don’t experience the level of fires that the Sierra, the Sierras do either now or historically. So the redwoods here are fire resistant. In fact, there’s been some pretty dramatic examples of state parks. With redwood forests that have dealt with some pretty mega fires that came through over the last four or five years down in the Bay Area. And seeing trees that, at first everybody thought, there’s no way these redwoods can survive the intensity of the fire that came through. But literally months later, you could just see the little green shoots coming out of it everywhere. And they did some studies and found that. The sugars going into these new growths have been stored underground for over 20 years, just waiting for a catastrophic event for it to spring back. So again they are remarkable. And even though it’s still wet and foggy a along the coast, we’re the extreme end of the wet and foggy up here and the national park area. Excuse me. So there’s not been a major fire in the old growth areas of the park here in many decades, maybe even since the park was created. Which is overall a good thing. At some point, fire needs to happen on the landscape to clean out the dead stuff and kind of start the cycle of new growth over again. The Redwoods have been very resilient to all the fires they’ve faced over the last decade or two since people have really been studying and examining the impacts of the fires on them.
Missy Rentz:
Interesting. And certainly the name of the park is Redwood, so I think when people think of it, they think of the forest and the big trees. But the parks are incredibly diverse. And one thing that sort of blew my mind, even though I knew where you were on the map, was that I was hiking and then a short drive later I was standing on the shore with the waves crashing on me, and it’s just very diverse.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah. That is a remarkable experience and I think you’re very similar to a lot of people, is everybody comes here for the trees. We and the visitor center did a poll asking people, why are you here? It’d probably be 99.9% to see the big trees. But people that have even a full day or two or three days very quickly realized there’s a lot more. And there’s even pretty impressive trees that aren’t always the coastal redwoods. There’s other amazing forests you can go see here as well. But the ocean is a really big draw or hook for a lot of people. Going out there and you can maybe see whales right after you just saw the biggest trees on the planet. Like how unique is that? We talked a little bit about dogs and you can walk your dogs along the beach here, which isn’t common in a lot of national parks. There’s campgrounds within the state parks that are right on the beach. We have back country campgrounds that are like way up in the creeks of Redwood Creek. And so you can get a little bit of everything here. One of the other surprising features is if you come here in the summer and you go up what we call the Bald Hills road, you get up above the forest line into a lot of the open meadows and prairies that we have here. And it can be 90 degrees up there, a five minute drive away from these forests that are still 60 degrees and cool. So there, there’s a little bit for everybody no matter what your interests are when you come.
Missy Rentz:
It’s definitely a park that layers are important’cause you do get a little bit of everything weather-wise when you’re at the park. Let’s talk a little bit about the conservation efforts that take place in the park. What are some of the big projects that you guys are working on?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, so the biggest one is called Redwoods Rising, and as I mentioned, the most of the park was logged, then it became National Park later on. And from the beginning there was a mission to restore those disturbed areas to be old growth like conditions and. I think the biggest surprise for the visitors that come to our park is one of the main things we spending our spend, our time and energy here is cutting down trees. And that’s just shocking for people to hear. Of course, it’s not the old growth, we don’t cut down any of the old growth, but if you imagine there was an old growth area that maybe had 50 trees on it, it got logged. Then the timber companies planted intending to come back and log a decade or two later. They may have planted 500 trees in that same parcel of land, knowing that some wouldn’t make it, some would die. But just if you’re planting a garden at home, you put an extra seed so that the tall ones can grow up, and that’s what you collect later on. But then they didn’t come back because it came a national park. And so for 50 years this oversaturated ground saturated with seeds has just grown into these really thick forests that we call dog hair forests.’cause it feels like you’re like microscopic in a dog, which is these little trees all around you. But it’s really devoid of life. It’s a weird. Experience because there’s trees everywhere, but they’re so thick, nothing can survive on the ground. The animals can’t live there’cause there’s no diversity. And so those areas we go in and remove a lot of the trees that shouldn’t have been there to begin with, to give the few stronger ones a better chance to grow into these old growth flight conditions. So the forestry is one wing of that. We also do road removal. When the logging companies were here, they put in a lot of roads’cause they needed to get their. They’re big equipment to those really big trees, and most of those roads would cross over stream beds and. They would fill in the stream beds with dirt or trees. They weren’t harvesting so that they could drive over them that blocked the stream. So fish species, amphibians couldn’t move anymore. And the rest redwoods rising is forestry removing roads and daylighting those streams, opening them, that the them back up mostly for the aquatic species to have areas to live and thrive again.
Missy Rentz:
Oh.
Patrick Taylor:
In addition to Redwoods rising, I would say some of the other areas that maybe aren’t quite as formalized, but some big restoration areas is there’s a condor restoration program here. It’s was surprising for me when I heard Condors lived here.’cause you’d think, how could they manage around these? Giant trees. But they’re big birds, so big trees make sense for’em. And they would eat things that would die along the coast and up in the prairies. But they were gone for over a century and just a couple of years ago they were brought back primarily from work done by the Yurok tribe, but on National Park Service Land and in partnership with us and many other agencies have played a role in this. So the condors are a major success story in our restoration. And along that vein, there’s been a big emphasis on restoring tribal involvement in the park, whether that’s them leading programs or participating in cultural burns on the landscape again, or playing a role in management decisions. Just really trying to ensure that the tribes have a greater role in preserving this land that they know more about than any of us.
Missy Rentz:
I was gonna, I and I, I. Shame on me for not addressing it sooner because this was tribal land. This yeah. And that there’s a lot of parks that go through this where they, the land was taken and now the park surface is trying to figure out how do we tell that story. And and it’s important that they’re back involved in what was their land.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah we’re fortunate here. There’s several tribes we work with and they’re all very engaged, very supportive, very willing to do their part. And what I would say is. One of the things I’m still learning how to change my mindset about a little bit is not how can we tell their stories, but like how do we let them tell their stories on our facility and our facilities that we own right now, even though we know it historically, it’s theirs. So that’s been a big push of the park over the last couple of years is really letting our infrastructure or our brand, like the Arrowhead brand, play a role in bringing people in, but then them telling the stories.
Missy Rentz:
Absolutely. And learning from them. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So the preservation of the Redwoods, it all started with an organization called Save the Redwoods League, and. Passionate volunteers are really vital in parks and redwoods is no different. You all are very, have a very loyal kind of volunteer program.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, so Save the Redwoods League is an amazing organization. It’s grown and changed over the years, even though their name is Redwoods League. They even play a big role for the Sequoias now. So they are essential in a lot of the work that has happened over the last century or so here. One of the things I really like talking about. Changing narratives a little bit, and they’re very honest about some of this too, is they’re probably the first coalesced group really that’s recognized that was saving redwoods, but it was a lot of individuals that really played a key role. So sometimes it was the wives of the logging. Families that would say Hey, don’t cut that one down. We need a spot to picnic. Or We can enjoy this area. We like the wildlife in it. So it was a lot of individuals like what we call garden clubs up in the area that really started that initial preservation group and then saved the redwoods League was, this is a century ago, was the white powerful men that came in that had a little more pull to stop things and start enacting policies for preservation as well. But all of their legacy is still alive a well and essential to the management of not just our park but all parks. Any national park you go to, there’s a volunteer coordinator and there’s volunteers that do things that are very visible, like work at front desks or go out and help maintain trails, but they also do a lot of things behind the scenes. They help maintain like digital archives. Lots of parks have people that do the photography work that you see on social media. Sometimes they do the masonry work, so the national parks have a lot of staff that are good, a lot of things. But sometimes there’s just specialty work that like we just don’t have somebody that knows how to make a brick wall at our park because there’s only one of them. So we don’t need a full-time employee that just does that and volunteers will come and fill those roles. And so the parks very much operate today because of the work of volunteers.
Missy Rentz:
I think it’s so impressive when you dive into history at how an individual or a group made such a massive impact on the group. Growth of a park or securing lands and things like that. It’s amazing and those things are still important today. So if people are interested in getting involved, most parks, like you said, have some sort of a friends group.
Patrick Taylor:
If I can put a pitch in most national parks, at least the bigger ones that kind of have their own housing community. If you’re a little more remote, you get to live in a park for free if you volunteer 32 hours a week. And so it’s not quite a full-time job. Usually you get to set what your work is a little bit, it’s gotta be for the better betterment of the park, not just your hobby. But. Almost every volunteer I’ve talked to in the parks over my many years here has just said it’s this incredible experience. They benefited from the parks. They wanted to give back a little bit, but they still end up getting more than they give, which is remarkable considering how much they give.
Missy Rentz:
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk about planning a trip to visit Redwoods. When you’re planning a trip, what’s the first step you recommend that people go through?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah. One step, but three stages. Download the National Park Service app. That’s got every national park in it. Then go to Redwood National Park and save it. And what that will do when you save it is allows you to access all the data if you’re offline. So if there’s no cell signal where you are, you can still pull up most of the information. And most importantly, the map will still work with your GPS. Pin on the map. So you will always know where you are in relation to the trail or the parking lot. And then the last step is, I would say find the one thing you’re most excited to experience when you get here. So it’s probably big trees, tall trees. We know generally that’s what people want. But even within that, there’s. Do you wanna see the tallest tree that’s standing by itself? Or do you wanna see the biggest grove or do you want to go see big trees where there’s not a lot of people? Or do you like the crowds and the energy? So one of the things I think no matter where you’re going on your trip is like, what’s the one thing that like, this is the real reason I’m going there. I wanna do a lot, I wanna experience a lot, but what’s that one thing you wanna do? And build backwards from there, because I’ve seen some people that. Have good experiences, but they get so distracted with the cool other things that at the end they say oh, we never made it to Stout Grove. That was the one thing we wanted to see, but we didn’t know how fun the coast was gonna be. Or that we would stop at the visitor center and watch a film or whatever it is. Make sure you keep the first thing. The first thing.
Missy Rentz:
And one of the things that was challenging for me when I was planning was the state national. Marriage because where do I get camping reservations, what do I need, updates for what are my rules type thing. So how do you recommend someone navigate that?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, that’s one of the areas we wish we could be a little bit better. But there’s just some bigger policies that don’t allow us to totally remove the barriers of the dual management in that. If you want to campground. Within Redwood National and state Parks, you need to go to reserve California. All of the campgrounds are owned by the state parks, managed by the state parks and the system they use as Reserve California. So if you know you want to camp here, that’s your only option. Go to reserve California. Unless you wanna do like extreme back country camping, then there’s a few little national park ones. For the rest of the planning in terms of what’s open, what’s closed, what are the trail conditions, what can I do there? Can I look at your web camera? I’m a teacher that wants to do a field trip. I would say a lot of that you’d want to go to the National Park Service webpage or the National Park Service app. And where we can on both websites, we do try to like point people back to the other one where it makes sense, but it’s not always intuitive and sometimes things change and it takes a while for the website to catch up. So along with all that, I would say when you get here, walk into a visitor center and kind of ground truth, whatever you think, with a ranger.’cause they’ll be able to say oh, that actually isn’t quite right. Here’s the little nuance to that. And once you’ve done your research and talk to somebody here, it should go pretty smoothly.
Missy Rentz:
Yeah, and it’s a long park, especially when take the national and state. Components. How would you recommend someone decide what part of the park to visit? I was there for, I think, four days, and I got a small piece of the park just because of the things that were priorities for me. But how would you recommend someone go about making that decision?
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, I think the multiple days is really big. Sometimes people come in and say, I have today. That’s it. Where should I go? And I would say the experiences and the resources, the forest you can see on the north and the south are very comparable. So if you only have time to do one, you’re not gonna entirely miss out on what an old growth forest is like. But broadly speaking, what I’d say is. Down in the south end, there’s more options for trails. So if you’re just like, all I wanna do is maximize my hiking time, the South is probably a little bit better outta the Prairie Creek area, for example. But if you’re a little more interested in diversity, like no, I also want to be on the coast and maybe kayaking the river and walk my dog on the beach. Then the north is probably a little bit more. More appealing to you. There’s also more campgrounds in the north, so if you’re planning to camp, the north is probably gonna be your best option or easiest option to get into. But ideally, yes, you would spend at least two days here, one in the north, one in the south, the. Biggest difference, I would say between the two of them though, is the North has the Smith River. There’s a saying when I moved here years ago that I heard the local say is, you come for the trees but you stay for the river. And I found that to be very true. The Smith River is just this incredible resource that honestly, the first few times I came as a visitor, I never went to. Because I felt like I just gotta see redwoods. I just gotta see redwoods. And I only stayed in the forest, but it’s the only major Undammed River in California. It’s about the clearest water you’ll ever see. You can kayak on it, you can fish on it. And so a lot of people that live around here in the summer, they don’t go to the coast to play in the water. They go to the Smith River to play in the water. So that, that I think is the one resource that the North offers at the south just doesn’t have an equivalent for it all.
Missy Rentz:
And the other thing I wanna talk about a little bit with camping. So I did not plan far enough in advance and there were no campsites, but that region has a lot of private campgrounds. And so if you get on the other apps for camping, like dirt and things like that, you can find other places, cabins, campgrounds, things like that.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s very rare that there’s nothing available in the area at all. There are county campgrounds, private campgrounds forest service campgrounds. So yeah, there, there’s almost always something. If you’re just like, I just gotta sleep somewhere for the next two nights, you will have options. It just might not always be the underneath an old growth red way.
Missy Rentz:
Absolutely, and I’ll say I part, I camped at a campground that was on a river, not the Smith River. I was in the South and it was so beautiful that I took a day and just sat by the river and I watched like bald eagles flying around and it’s pretty spectacular just to be any place in nature in that region.
Patrick Taylor:
Yep.
Missy Rentz:
So I visited in the middle of the summer and it was incredible because the rest of the country, even like Sacramento, which is just a few hours south was so hot. And then I came there and I was in like a sweatshirt and sweatpants the whole time. So when people are planning a visit, how do they prepare for the weather?
Patrick Taylor:
Layers is the only right answer to this question. So especially if you’re planning on doing more than one thing in that day, you can’t just say I’m just wearing my t-shirt, or I’m just gonna wear my coat because you’ll inevitably end up too hot or too cold. But it’s even in the summer, most mornings are pretty chilly here, especially if you’re in the forest, these areas the bottom of the forest floor often doesn’t get any direct sunlight, even on the summer days. And so if you’re camping in there, for example, you keep waiting for it to warm up and it’s probably not really gonna warm up while you’re here. So you want to have, what I’d recommend is like a t-shirt, a light sweater, and then a raincoat. And you can get away with that almost year round if you’re here in the middle of winter. Maybe switch over to waterproof hiking boots and you want a beanie as well. But part of what lets the redwoods thrive here, the environment also makes it pretty easy for visitors to come here. Like you’re never gonna need heavy duty winter clothes. You’re also probably never really gonna be comfortable in t-shirt and shorts. Maybe if you do those high elevation ones for a little while, or if you get the coast on two or three days a year. But yeah, what you wanna do is stress some layers. The other thought I had about that, it’s actually not about dressing, but it’s about timing a little bit. So when people come here, they wanna see the big redwoods and the photo they want of it is where there’s fog. And the sunlight beam was coming through all the different layers of the trees and the fog and it mixing. And the best time to get those photos or have that experience, even if you don’t want a picture of it, is when the sun is still low on the horizon. It doesn’t work too well like this. The summer when the sun is straight overhead in the afternoon. So when you come here, if that’s really what you’re aiming for, your choices are either come in the winter when the sun never gets too high in the sky. Then you have a lot of daylight hours where the sun’s pretty low and it’s pretty foggy. But if you come in the summer, you really gotta get going early in the morning. You gotta be out there probably before you want to when you’re on a vacation day. To get the chance for the fog and the sun to still put that, that out there. And so that’s why you want your sweater and your coat,’cause you’re gonna get this great photo, but it’s not necessarily comfortable for you when the conditions are right for those images.
Missy Rentz:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. We’ve talked a little bit about what people can do, but I just want you to fill in the gaps that we haven’t talked about. What activities can people do when they’re visiting Redwoods?
Patrick Taylor:
So you can do scenic drives. We’ve got a couple amazing roads where you go straight through the park, never get out of it, still have a lifelong experience of seeing it. We always hope people get out and walk around or hike a little bit. There’s a lot of areas where you can bike, some areas where you can e-bike, some areas where you can regular. Do like mountain biking and some of the mountain bike routes go where you wouldn’t expect national parks to allow them to go in because it’s not a national park, you’re in a state park. So we lean on their policies to allow people to get into some areas. People do horseback riding here, both in the forest and on the beaches I mentioned. There’s the beautiful Smith River. We have kayakers and the park service, even host kayak programs that are very inexpensive for the public to sign up and go out with a ranger. Talked about fishing, birding, looking for wildlife. There’s people to go out hunting mushrooms. There’s I’m missing probably two thirds of the list, but those are some of the main ones that people are most interested in.
Missy Rentz:
And one of the things I just wanna shout from the mountaintop, because what I, what, there’s a lot that was amazing about this park, but your embracing of dogs was better than any park I have ever been to. Down to the fact that I went to get a brochure, the standard brochure for the national parks, and they gave me one that was dog friendly with the listing of dog friendly hikes and beaches. And whatnot. So I also wanna talk a little bit about that and how you embrace our four-legged friends.
Patrick Taylor:
Yeah, I think it, I wasn’t here when the policy shift happened, but my understanding is this is another benefit of that marriage with California Department of Parks and Recreation, where they just holistically kind of embrace dogs a little bit more than the national parks do. And so it was just leaning on the strengths of each other and say, how can we increase. The experience for dogs and for people to have dogs too, without like fundamentally challenging our policies or some of the things that define the national park experiences. And there are several areas you can take dogs in the old growth forest, the beaches are all open and they do need to be leached for all of those. There’s scenic overlooks where you can stop with them. And so I think it’s just a recognition that, especially California out west is a relatively high urban interface area. Our area of California is not as busy as the Bay Area or la of course, but I think there’s just this recognition that like people are coming, they’re gonna bring their dogs, let’s make it work for everybody as well as possible.
Missy Rentz:
I got to have the most beautiful experience. Answer there that in most parks I wouldn’t get to do half of what I did because you have, it’s a handful of trails, but it was enough trails for us to go hiking and to have a really good time and for me to get to see the park even though I had my dog with me, and I just really appreciated that for, from the park.
Patrick Taylor:
That bark brochure, if anybody’s coming, is the best one to get the specifics of it. But Cal Barrel Road is probably the one you went on. Or Walker Road way up to the north. Those are the two best spots to go and have those experiences.
Missy Rentz:
And the beach. She was so excited to be on the beach that day.
Patrick Taylor:
yeah. And I’ll add, we talked a little bit a minute ago about lodging, how there’s also Forest service and other areas right around us. The same idea applies for dogs. So there’s the Smith River National Recreation area. If you’re on the beaches in Crescent City, the National Park Service Beach, where it ends, which you wouldn’t notice walking around’cause it feels like it’s the same beach, it becomes Crescent City Beach. They have even more liberal dog policies where like the dogs can be off leash more as long as they’re under control. So yeah, you can come here and have, whether it’s a beach walk or a forest walk or camping, a lot more freedoms or immediately in our partners have those experiences.
Missy Rentz:
That’s good to know. Okay, so we end each episode with a speed round of questions. Just answer what first comes to mind.
Patrick Taylor:
Okay.
Missy Rentz:
What is your earliest park memory?
Patrick Taylor:
Lehman Cave at Great Basin in National Park. My family about once a year would do a cross Nevada road trip on Highway 50, known as the Loneliest Road in America. And there’s not a lot to stop and do there. And so that’s where we would always stop.
Missy Rentz:
What made you love the parks?
Patrick Taylor:
I grew up not. With a family that sought out park experiences. So we did go camping once or twice a year. Usually just like local county parks, it was a lot of junk food. Your car 10 feet away from you. There was no big ethics lessons about leave, no trace. But what it was just having fun and realizing outdoors is a fun place we can enjoy. It’s not something scary. So I think that’s what initially turned the key in me. Then learning more about the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and the Park Service. The Park Service mission just resonated with me a little bit more than the others did.
Missy Rentz:
What is your favorite thing about Redwoods? National and state parks?
Patrick Taylor:
How accessible it is, and I don’t. I don’t necessarily mean it for like wheelchair users or people harder or low vision, but what I mean by accessible, which also applies to some of those groups, is you don’t have to go on an epic hike or ride a shuttle bus or figure out this complicated advanced reservation system or be packed in with thousands of people. To have this incredible life changing experience. We do have some reservations and other things, so I don’t get people too excited about it. But you can show up with very little planning, not knowing where you’re going or what you wanna do. Talk to a Ranger in 10 minutes later, be having this experience that you’ll tell people about the rest of your life.
Missy Rentz:
What is your favorite thing to do at Redwoods? National and state Parks?
Patrick Taylor:
Show it to people for the first time. Seeing people’s reaction to the trees just rekindle something in me that helps me remember my first experience and how amazing it was. But more specifically, if somebody’s I’m going there, what’s the one thing I should do? We talked about this earlier. Hike on the beach. I then walk, I’m sorry, hike in the Redwood forest. I then go walk on the beach.
Missy Rentz:
What park have you yet to visit, but it’s on your bucket list and why?
Patrick Taylor:
I’ve not been to Alaska at all, broadly speaking, all the Alaska Parks, but probably Kenai Fjord specifically to go out and see the glaciers and the whales.
Missy Rentz:
What are three must-haves you pack for a park visit?
Patrick Taylor:
National Park Service app, as I mentioned flexibility. I know that’s not a physical thing, but there is almost zero chance you’re gonna show up at a national park and everything’s gonna go exactly as you want it. The campground’s gonna be full or you’re gonna have missed. The bus or the last ranger program already went for the day. So showing up with that vision of what you want to happen, but flexibility and how you get to that experience. And then treats. So I have five daughters and we quickly learned that if the kids aren’t having fun, mom and dad don’t have fun. And it’s amazing what treats can solve. You’re waiting for the sun to set or set up your tent or whatever it is. So lots and lots of treats.
Missy Rentz:
What is your favorite campfire activity?
Patrick Taylor:
It’s probably similar to a lot of people, but eating s’mores. And then our twist on it is listening to the Camp Monster podcast series. So it’s something that our kids really like listening to and gives mom and dad a break from being creative to listen to somebody else, tell them a story.
Missy Rentz:
A tent, camper, or cabin.
Patrick Taylor:
At this point, we’re a camper family. I mentioned all the kids and the the tent wasn’t working out so well anymore, so we’ve been a camper for a little while, but we’ve experienced them all. They’re all amazing, and they’ve all got their place.
Missy Rentz:
And are you hiking with or without trekking poles?
Patrick Taylor:
Here in Redwoods, typically without, and that’s because most of our hikes are not super long, nor do most of them have a whole lot of elevation gain or loss associated with them. But if I’m doing a long hike, then I bring the poles.
Missy Rentz:
What is your favorite trail snack?
Patrick Taylor:
It’s called leaking, muy, dehydrated mangoes. So I lived in Hawaii for a few years and it’s this dehydrated, plump powder they put on dry fruit, and it’s incredible. It’s natural sugar, but I get to tell myself this is fruit, so I can eat as much as I want and not feel guilty about it.
Missy Rentz:
What is your favorite animal sighting?
Patrick Taylor:
The California condor. So we talked about that before. It’s not a guarantee. If you come to Redwood, you’re gonna see California condor. In fact, most people do not. But if you go to the right places and look for’em, and especially if you know the story behind how many people put in the work and what it means, not just to the natural environment, but also to the cultural significance of the tribes. It’s just incredible to see a living, breathing animal that’s here. Because of what people have done and sacrificed to bring it back.
Missy Rentz:
What is your favorite sound in a park?
Patrick Taylor:
Silence, which sounds weird, but I’ve worked at a couple of places that are very silent. So I worked at Death Valley National Park and it can be really quiet there. I’ve worked at cave parks where it can be really quiet when you go down inside there, but the silence here in the redwoods is different. So when you’re deep in the old growth forest, if there’s not other people around and you really stop. It is surprising how quiet it is’cause there’s so much plant life around you. You would expect it to just be teeming with bugs and birds and everything. And it is, there’s a lot of life there, but redwoods are not super conducive for insects to eat. And so there’s not as many insects, hence not as many birds and other predators coming after those insects, maybe as you’d expect. So sometimes I’ve been in the redwood forest. You can’t hear anything, but it’s like a very soft silence. Not maybe the hard silence of a cave or a death valley. It’s just this very calm oh, there’s nothing. And how often in our life is there Nothing
Missy Rentz:
And what is the greatest gift that the parks give to us?
Patrick Taylor:
I. A sense of place and belonging. So I think we all want to feel big and important and relevant, but I feel that there’s this weird inverse relationship that when we come to parks especially the big. Natural parks. You see a giant redwood in a lush forest or you see the Milky way over a dark desert park or the ocean from the coast, and you feel very small. But I never feel a deeper sense of connection to the world around me when I’m doing that. So I think the gift of Parks gives us is it really helps cement the relationship we have, that we’re a part of the earth, not apart from the earth.
Missy Rentz:
I agree. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for the stories and the history and the information on Redwoods. I feel like I got to relive my first experience just in conversation today, and I’m very grateful to you for that.
Patrick Taylor:
I appreciate it. Thank you. It was nice talking.
Missy Rentz:
Thanks for joining us for today’s episode. Until next time, we’ll see you in the parks.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please be sure to like and share on your favorite podcast platform. Music for the parks podcast is performed and produced by Porter Hardy. For more information, please follow us at The Parks Podcast, or visit our website at TheParksPodcast.com.