Prairie Creek State Park
Prairie Creek State Park sits approximately 40 miles north of Eureka and features a spectacular old growth forest. "Old growth" forest refers to a forest that has not been logged by humans.
Much is made of the rain forest of the Amazon Basin, but a measurement of the bio-mass/acre showed that old growth redwood forests hold 9 times that of the Amazon. It is for this incredible profusion of life that Prairie Creek State Park has been classified by the United Nations as a World Heritage site and an International Biosphere Reserve.
In this case, some of these trees have been alive for over 1,000 years. This is one of the few remaining old growth forests still in existence in the United States, and it features the incredible coastal redwood, sequoia sempervirens. These are the tallest living things on earth.
John Steinbeck said of these trees, "The Redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always … they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time."
I also like the way the some of the first Europeans living here in the late 19th Century described them. These trees were so tall "it took two men to look all the way to the top".
When Europeans first arrived, there were two million acres of old growth forests. In 1993, there were less than 90,000 acres of old growth left. This means that more than 90% of these forests have disappeared and the loss is much higher for the redwoods.
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