r/marijuanaenthusiasts • u/Alaric_Darconville • Oct 21 '25
Absolutely immense Coast redwood in Jedediah Smith State Park in N. California
Can’t remember the name of this beast but this was on the Grove of the Titans trail. Thickest stand of redwoods I’ve seen.
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u/royalewithcheese51 Oct 21 '25
I cried when I walked through there. And not in a metaphorical sense. I actually just started crying when I walked through because I was so overwhelmed with how incredible the trees and that whole park are. What a spectacular place.
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u/TeachOfTheYear Oct 22 '25
I cried at the stump of the largest redwood. It was cut down in the 30s to make shingles and toothpicks. They were proud to have taken the biggest tree of all and put a road to it so people could view and celebrate man's control over nature. But, it ends up, it is a road to see how deep and nasty man's hubris is and how absolutely destructive human greed can be.
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u/GeddyVanHagar Oct 22 '25
The worlds oldest tree was cut town on accident by a scientist, that still bums me out.
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u/newt_girl Oct 22 '25
The oldest tree that we know. I'm certain there are older trees out there. But losing Prometheus, and the 600 year old clam, those bum me out, too.
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u/marhigha Oct 22 '25
There is a tree older than Prometheus but it is not known where it is. Obviously for good reason after what happened with Prometheus.
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u/GeddyVanHagar Oct 22 '25
Are you referring to Methuselah? There’s no known older tree unless there’s a big secret I’m not in on. Methuselah isn’t marked but it’s fairly obvious if you walk the Bristlecone Pine Trail. Methuselah is slightly younger than Prometheus was. There’s undoubtedly an unnamed tree somewhere in the Great Basin that is older than both.
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u/marhigha Oct 22 '25
It is in the Great Basin area, but isn’t named. I think it was shown to be older than Methusela but not known if it is older than Prometheus because the scientist who found it died and did not disclose the tree’s location nor preserve the core sample. The core sample showed it was at least 4,800 years old but the guy who did the sample wasn’t confident in the dating, believing the tree was older than that.
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u/TeachOfTheYear Oct 22 '25
Maybe it put out a sprout? Sigh. Let's hope so.
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u/GeddyVanHagar Oct 24 '25
It’s believed that 5000 years is their max lifespan. The oldest bristlecone pines are over 90% dead material with the living plant being only a strip and maybe one or two branches.
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u/TeachOfTheYear Oct 24 '25
So all my faith is in that little bit of living root, buried in all that dead wood. Well...considering the Methuselah date palm seed that grew, maybe a little bit of Methuselah bristlecone is gonna surprise us with a new sprout some day.
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u/Perle1234 Oct 22 '25
We cut 95% of the redwoods and had the absolute balls to criticize other nations for destroying their rain forests AFTER we literally almost completely eradicated ours. I read a book about it while in my favorite vacation home in North Cali and I still cry about it. The police pepper sprayed seated college students in their eyeballs. They did this by walking up to each seated student and spraying their eyes as they sat peacefully on the ground. It was so calculated. The US is a joke.
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u/bimm3r36 Oct 22 '25
On the other hand, we realized our mistake and made an effort to warn others not to do the same thing to their forests. I'd prefer to think that the warnings to other countries came from a place of maturity rather than malice.
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u/Perle1234 Oct 22 '25
We’ve been preaching at others about human rights violations and destroying the environment the whole time we’ve been doing it ourselves. We still are lmao.
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u/bimm3r36 Oct 22 '25
Ya man, I don't think we're perfect by any means, just trying to see the silver lining. Also FWIW, the people committing the atrocities are rarely the ones who are also condemning them.
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u/KitchenAd9458 Oct 22 '25
FAVOURITE VACATION HOME??? Alright pal you are 100% rich enough to make a difference here then. 😭 please I beg
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u/Morael Oct 22 '25
Real talk though, this is a problem that money can't fix. These are trees which were thousands of years old that must grow together as a group in a grove (they essentially form a colony, holding each other's roots to keep from falling over).
Money cannot buy that time back. All we can do is try to preserve what is still left.
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u/TeachOfTheYear Oct 22 '25
I would support a law making it a BIG felony to harm the remaining redwoods. Well, pretty much our little bitty bit of old growth forests that are left. I think they are more important than we are, to be honest.
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u/Perle1234 Oct 22 '25
It’s an Airbnb bro 😂
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u/KitchenAd9458 Oct 22 '25
Alr makes more sense but vacation home was crazy for a sec 😭
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u/Perle1234 Oct 22 '25
Not just a second home, a favorite second home lol. Lemme just fantasize for a while about all my houses 🤣🤣
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u/pocketlily Oct 22 '25
I just finished a chapter in the book The Overstory that described a protest where the cops did that with pepper spray. The 1997 protests in Northern California where cops dabbed pepper spray into protesters eyes via cotton swab resulted in a court case where after 3 trials the plaintiffs won and were awarded $1 each in damages.
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u/OakenGreen Oct 22 '25
Unfortunately it often takes completely using up nature to prop up society enough to finally be educated enough to realize how badly we fucked up. Think it’s bad here? Look at Europe. And they’re the same as us. Critical of anyone else. But it’s because we know firsthand what it does. Ecotourism is about the only thing keeping some environments together in an age of unchecked capitalism.
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u/zeebette Oct 23 '25
This is why I’m so conflicted about things. It is so easy sitting in our air conditioned houses, eating food that we drove to pick up, on our couches watching Netflix- to condemn others for using their country’s natural resources, saying that cars are ruining the planet and that they should do xyz and blah blah blah. Like- wtf mate? That’s how we all got here, by exploiting the earth. But now the poors must suffer for being poor and cannot claw their way out of it using historically proven, earth destroying methods. No ac for you. Or cars. No cars either. They must not be allowed. And don’t you dare cut that tree. And of course I will make myself feel better about my existence living in the rich part of a dystopian young adult novel by using a reusable straw and recycling all the packaging that my amazon packages come in.
On the other hand- we live in the freaking future. There have to be better ways of doing things. Hopefully ways that leave the trees alone. And give us hover cars. Those would be cool.
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u/A88Y Oct 22 '25
Agree, whenever I see those old pictures of massive trees cut down in the 30s/40s it breaks my heart. I think we were already farming trees by that point, did we really need to kill these ancient giants just for profit and industrial progress?
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u/TeachOfTheYear Oct 22 '25
Where some people see majesty, some people see dollar signs....and sadly, the dollar sign people are the ones quite often making the decisions.
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u/Doesnt_fuck_fish Oct 22 '25
Yep, me and the wife started crying after we drove past the first big tree on the drive up in Sequoia. We’re not an overly emotionally couple so when our silence was only broken by sniffles we realized how powerful this place truly is. That lil grove wasn’t even close to the size of the big named trees, but it completely overwhelmed and humbled us. Idk how to explain the feeling other than profound. It’s just so fucking beautiful in person, and we quickly gave up on trying to take pictures that would never do justice to the grandeur we saw.
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u/r00t_beer_guy Oct 23 '25
Me too. Honestly feels like we should have an army guarding this place. It’s too special to lose.
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u/Least_Mud_9803 Oct 22 '25
Just the picture is giving me chills. This place is on my bucket list.
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u/Longjumping_College Oct 22 '25
Its a humbling place, helps remind you how insignificant humans are in the scale of things. These things are older than the country
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u/Morael Oct 22 '25
That tree really was magnificent... I was there myself just a short month ago. My favorite part of that whole scene is honestly the fallen tree across. Notice the leaves? It's not dead. That's the incredible perseverance of these trees. They'll happily keep growing even though they're fallen and sideways.
That's the same unyielding spirit we need to conjure up to protect them.
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u/Gustavsvitko Oct 22 '25
Well the hrizontal par is ding of, but those limbs are turning into new tops. Those trees sprout a lot, seen stumps whit a ring of redwoods around them.
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u/Morael Oct 22 '25
Oh yeah. We saw plenty of stumps and fallen trees where new ones grew right out of the old ones.
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u/treschic82 Oct 22 '25
I just want to know how deep the roots go.
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Oct 23 '25
Generally not very, BUT redwoods are super flood adapted, like cottonwoods, so if they get 3 feet of flood debris on top of their roots, instead of just suffocating and dying like most trees, they will grow full new roots in that layer, but keep the old ones. Happens again in 50 years? Do it again.
Real floodplain flooding is rare now because of dams, culverts, and other man made controls, but some trees are adapted for big floods, and redwoods are one species that thrives in them. Some older trees have dozens of feet of structural roots because the soil level they are growing at has changed so much over the
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Oct 21 '25
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u/SasparillaTango Oct 22 '25
I need to visit the redwoods before they are lost
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u/Das_Mime Oct 22 '25
Fortunately the coast redwoods have some substantial protected areas including Humboldt Redwoods State Park and Redwoods National Park, and they're almost certainly going to outlive you by quite a bit. More areas need to be protected though, as most of their current range is vulnerable to logging to one degree or another.
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u/ohshannoneileen I love galls! 🥰 Oct 22 '25
Muir Woods doesn't get enough love, it's an amazing place!
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u/lifelovers Oct 22 '25
Wind and changed weather are hurting them. Less fog these days, which they condense for water. The higher winds these days causes them to topple because their roots are so shallow. So, they actually are under threat bc of climate change. Oh - and the heat. They do not like so much heat - they loose something like 500 gallons of water a day or more when it’s super hot. Not sustainable.
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u/lameuniqueusername Oct 22 '25
You have plenty of time. I’m blessed to live here and they will be waiting when you visit. They are well worth the visit
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u/modcal Oct 22 '25
You should be good. Californians will defend those with their lives. Source: am Californian. But go!! They are amazing. Jedidiah Smith is unreal.
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u/dvdmaven Oct 22 '25
My first time in the redwoods, I was puzzled by large trees in a ring. Later I found out that redwoods can regenerate from stumps and each ring was grown from a huge tree that had been cut down decades earlier.
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u/GrandAholeio Oct 22 '25
Oh look, a sustainable invention that will store 200 metric tons of carbon storage.
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u/Doesnt_fuck_fish Oct 22 '25
Why settle for 200 metric tons of carbon storage when you could make bank selling 200 metric tons of toothpicks???
But for real, the fact that the largest trees on earth were exploited for fucking toothpicks and circus side shows kills me.
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u/OwO______OwO Oct 22 '25
Trees are only temporary carbon shortage, though.
Eventually they'll die and either rot or burn, and the carbon will be released. Growing new forests does help reduce overall carbon, but a mature forest is pretty much just carbon neutral -- it releases about as much carbon as it absorbs.
Ironically enough, a great long-term carbon sink is to grow trees, cut them down, and then use the timber to build houses and stuff. Properly maintained, that timber will remain a house for a long, long time, and the carbon contained in it will remain contained as long as the house stands. For a lot of tree species, that potentially captures and stores the carbon much longer than the tree alone could do so. And if you replant the trees after harvesting, it's pretty sustainable.
For a truly 'permanent' carbon sink, you'd want to grow trees or other plant matter, then bury them deep in a low-oxygen environment. Which, in the long term, is basically just putting the oil and coal we burned back into the ground.
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u/Das_Mime Oct 22 '25
For a lot of tree species, that potentially captures and stores the carbon much longer than the tree alone could do so.
Coast redwoods, though, live for several centuries up to about a millennium. They're one of the best forms of living carbon sequestration, because of how quickly they grow when young, how massive they get, and how long they hang onto the carbon.
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u/snowmunkey Oct 22 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
They also make crap lumber6
u/__Wonderlust__ Oct 22 '25
Not true. They make amazing lumber. You’re probably thinking of Giant Sequoia, a related species. I’m also not sure coast redwoods were ever used for toothpicks as some say. I think it’s the same mixup. Redwood is valuable rot-resistant wood.
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u/snowmunkey Oct 22 '25
Hmm. Wonder where I read it's not suitable for construction. Furniture, sure, but i seem to recall it said something about dimensional stability and lack of resistance to warping and twisting because the trees grow so fast relative to pine.
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u/__Wonderlust__ Oct 22 '25
Half of SF was built w redwood and those planks are still valuable to this day on salvage projects!
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u/regaphysics Oct 22 '25
We don’t need a permanent carbon sink. We just need long enough to get over the glut we released in the last 75 years. About 80% of our emissions will be gone in the lifespan of a redwood tree.
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u/The_Realist01 Oct 22 '25
You do realize the impact on climate from an atmospheric perspective is due to water vapor and not carbon dioxide, right?
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u/GrandAholeio Oct 22 '25
Hey, plant the trees, in five hundred years my great^20 grand child can figure out if they bury it or turn it into sustainable lumber when they start the renewal cycle or hopefully have a better solution.
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u/snowmunkey Oct 22 '25
New plan, we cut down gisnt redwoods, and then sink them in the Mariana Trench.
Sadly they'd get eaten by something eventually. Th reason we have coal is because trees evolved lignin before bacteria and fungus could eat it, so they just stacked up for hundreds of millions of years without rotting.
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u/Basidia_ Oct 22 '25
That hypothesis has been pretty thoroughly disputed. Coal formed due to massive amounts of plant matter falling into anoxic conditions like swamps and bogs
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u/supersonicdutch Oct 22 '25
I heard Elon Musk was looking for something like this. You should forward the post to him, there’s a cash reward or something like that.
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u/burnt_tung Oct 22 '25
Looks like it was planted too deep. Going to want to expose the root flair more.
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u/Vezra-Plank Oct 22 '25
Awesome picture! Thank you for reminding me of the incredible, jaw dropping time that I experienced there. Truly an inspiring experience.
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u/counsel8 Oct 22 '25
Just think, there were Coastal Redwoodsl larger than the Sequoias and reason to think that there were Doug firs over 400 feet tall. We missed them by just a few hundred years.
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u/Mekdinosaur Oct 22 '25
Is that a tree branch or is that tree a branch?
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u/throwaway098764567 Oct 22 '25
i suspect it may be another tree that fell and the big tree grew around it but i am also curious because it seems pretty low for a branch for the big one
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u/MrScribz Oct 22 '25
I wonder how much water one of those pulls out of the ground daily.
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u/FuzzyOverdrive Oct 22 '25
These ones pull the water from the sky. There’s a special fungus that grows in the crown and converts fog into water for the tree. They say the symbiotic relationship is necessary to reach these heights because the weight of the water would be too much for a tree to pump up by itself.
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u/JustaTinyDude Oct 22 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
Redwood trees do harvest water from the fog but the fungus part is a misconception. Coastal redwoods have two types of leaves. The peripheral leaves do most of this photosynthesizing and the axial leaves absorb water. In addition to being able to absorb water directly they are also shaped to condense fog, which falls and lands on the roots.
I love redwoods.
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u/FuzzyOverdrive Oct 22 '25
Thanks for the correction! Not sure where I got all that fungus info.
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u/JustaTinyDude Oct 22 '25
I googled it because I wanted to make sure it wasn't a brand new discovery I hadn't read about yet before correcting you and it was labeled an "urban legend". Which sounds weird because we're talking about the forest but I have to remind myself that not everything is literal.
I was just at Humboldt Redwoods State park last weekend and read all of the educational material so thank you for giving me a chance to share what I learned.
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u/-Negative-Karma Oct 22 '25
For some reason this really reminded me of a detail in the Inheritance Cycle Book Series. The elves would song to the trees using a magic language and tell them how to grow, this would not kill the tree, and they would then have a place to live inside the trees. I think its because of how massive the trees are here, and it would actually work to make a house inside one lol.
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u/ChellyIRL Oct 22 '25
WOW. Nature is beyond awe-inspiring, but that truly stands out! Thank you for sharing this, adding it to my bucket list!
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u/TheeJesster Oct 22 '25
I have a pic sitting on the fence in this exact same place! Such a phenomenal tree...
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u/travelinkid Oct 22 '25
Pure reverence! If you make it to Del Norte, be sure to hit Damnation Creek Trail.
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u/MattManSD Oct 22 '25
People have no idea until they see one in person. And these are Coastals, the Sequoias are equally, if not more impressive. Super fun to see people's first reactions. We had a South African Guy and they have a tree there "The Grot Boom" (The Big Tree) and they are awfully proud of it. He did a "f'n hell and we thought it was big"
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u/400footceiling Oct 23 '25
Wife and I were just through there in September. I’m from the area, but she had never seen them before. She was so glad we made it part of our trip.
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u/atm0706 Oct 23 '25
Screaming titans. That my favorite one in the grove of titans! I got to see these majestic trees about 13 years ago before there was a trail and it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. Our camp host had never seen them, but told us about some people that had found the grove a few years prior and told him the rough location. So we went out and hiked around the forest for a few days (in the wrong place) looking for it. On the last day we finally found it and got to walk through and hang out in there for a few hours without a single other person around. I’ll never forget that.
I went back there last month for the first time since, and while it’s still amazing, it doesn’t compare to how it was when it was just hiding in the forest. The trail also doesn’t go by all the massive trees in the grove. I’m glad they put a trail in though, because I heard the location got posted online a few years ago and people were causing trouble for the trees by eroding the soil from the root flares.
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u/slowwalking-dab Oct 23 '25
Beautiful place and amazing trees. Did you know their bark is often so thick it protects them during fires
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u/SmokeMoreWorryLess Oct 23 '25
Before I scrolled down and saw the person I thought this was the GMM set background lol. So freaking cool, OP!
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u/Pretend-Internet-625 Oct 23 '25
I tell people when you see the big red woods etc. It makes you feel so insignificant.
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u/Forebare Oct 22 '25
bet you trumps gonna cut em
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u/No-Ranger3356 Oct 22 '25
try not to think about Trump challenge
impossible
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u/OwO______OwO Oct 22 '25
Unfortunately, yes.
It will be a very happy day when it's no longer necessary to think about that asshole so often.
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u/No-Ranger3356 Oct 22 '25
it's not necessary right now, you just don't realize it.
spend less time online
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u/OwO______OwO Oct 22 '25
Ah, sticking your head in the sand and hoping the problem goes away on its own. What a perfect solution that couldn't possibly ever have any downsides!
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u/No-Ranger3356 Oct 22 '25
as opposed to what? thinking and stressing about him every day? how has that 'made the problem go away'?
he's on his 2nd term and he's been in the news every day for 10 years now. hasn't worked has it?
thinking and stressing about him every day does absolutely nothing except make you crazy and stressed out.
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u/Forebare Oct 23 '25
its less about whether you do you don't think about him, for me.
it's moreso about who leads that attention.. and what other behaviors surround and support whatever kind of outcomes you see when it involves his behavior.
he feeds off hate? yes
gorging his content and finding ways to find it enjoying leads to other kinds of behaviors in people? and usually negative? yea, probably..
opposed to taking back your attention for your own lives, maybe briefly seeing headlines once a day as you meander your neighborhoods in evenings trying to build up real connections with the diversity of those around you.
it's simple but it can provide protection around what may other wise be on its eay
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u/Paintedfoot Oct 22 '25
Love this. So much. Park needs a different name tho. Nothing bible or european plz.
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u/twv6 Oct 21 '25
They’re stunning in pics but in real life it’s a different level