The Tall Trees Grove Trail is a 4.5-mile (7.2 km) round trip hike to an alluvial flat along Redwood Creek in Redwood National Park, where the soil, water, and shelter combine to grow coast redwoods that exceed 350 feet (107 m). The National Park Service rates it moderately strenuous, allows 3 to 6 hours, and puts the total elevation change at 1,600 feet (487 m).

Getting here requires a free permit, and only 50 parties per day are allowed in. You reserve online, and the reservation comes with the combination to a locked gate across the access road. That gate is the whole character of this hike — it keeps the grove quiet in a park that sees plenty of traffic, and it means you have to plan ahead in a way that none of the other redwood walks demand.

We got the confirmation email with the pass and the gate code and felt like we’d been handed a backstage pass. That feeling holds up when you get down there.

Trail Facts

• Distance: 4.5 miles (7.2 km) round trip
• Elevation change: 1,600 feet (487 m) total; an 800-foot (244 m) descent to the grove and the same climb back out
• Time: 3 to 6 hours, including the drive in
• Difficulty: Moderately strenuous
• Trail surface: Aggregate and wood, 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 m) wide, with switchbacks, exposed roots, and grades over 10%
• Season: Year round
• Permit: Required, free, limited to 50 parties per day
• Fee: None
• Dogs: Not permitted. Service animals welcome.
• Accessibility: Not an ADA trail
• Facilities: Two vault toilets, a shelter, and interpretive panels at the trailhead

The Permit — Read This First

Reserve online. Permits are no longer issued in person at visitor centers. That’s a change from how this worked for years, and a lot of older blog posts and guidebooks still tell you to stop at a visitor center on the morning of your hike. Don’t plan around that.

• Free, limited to 50 parties per day
• Issued online only, through the park’s reservation system
• Book at least 24 hours ahead. NPS describes permits as issued up to 24 hours in advance; the booking window has shifted over the years, so check the current rules when you reserve.
• Your permit includes the gate combination for the Tall Trees Access Road

Because the daily cap is on parties rather than people, this is one of the few permits where a group of four costs you exactly as much of the quota as a solo hiker.

Getting There

Allow a full hour of driving from the nearest visitor center, and take that seriously — most of it isn’t on pavement.

From Highway 101 just north of Orick, turn onto Bald Hills Road and climb about 7 miles (11 km) to the Tall Trees Access Road, where the locked gate is. Punch in your combination, then descend roughly 6 miles (9.7 km) of narrow, winding dirt road to the trailhead.

Our own timestamps make the point: we were at the gate at 10:44 a.m. and didn’t take a photo on the trail until 11:26. That’s 42 minutes to cover six miles.

Vehicle limits are strict and enforced by physics rather than signage. The parking area at the bottom does not accommodate RVs over 21 feet (6.4 m) or any vehicle towing a trailer. If you’re road-tripping the redwoods in a rig, you’ll need to leave it somewhere and take a smaller vehicle.

Do not rely on digital maps to find the gate. NPS says this outright — map accuracy and data coverage in this area are poor. Rangers provide directions when you get your permit. Write them down, because there’s no cell service up there either.

Hiking to the Tall Trees Grove

The trail drops immediately and keeps dropping, switchbacking 800 feet down the valley wall toward Redwood Creek.

The descent is genuinely pleasant — shaded, well graded, and lined with the kind of understory that only grows where there’s this much water. Fallen giants lie across the slope, some of them arching high enough over the trail to walk under.

Keep in mind on the way down that you’ll be climbing every foot of this back out, at the end of the day, with tired legs. That’s the part people underestimate. The hike down is easy enough that it flatters you.

The Grove Floor

Reaching the flat changes the forest completely. This is an alluvial floodplain — flat, deep, well-watered soil, sheltered from winter wind — and it’s exactly the combination redwoods need to reach maximum height. The grove holds a concentration of trees over 350 feet.

The ferns down here run waist-high and higher, and the loop through the grove is flat and soft after the switchbacks.

Fallen trees leave root plates standing two stories high with caves underneath them. It’s the clearest illustration you’ll get of how shallow a redwood’s root system actually is — these trees hold themselves up by interlocking roots with their neighbors, not by anchoring deep.

The bigleaf maples are the surprise. Down on the flat they grow large and carry so much moss and epiphyte load that the branches look upholstered. After two hours of looking at redwood bark, they’re a genuine change of subject.

The Libby Tree and the 1963 National Geographic Survey

The grove is named for the Libby Tree, also called simply “the Tall Tree,” and its story is the reason this park exists.

In 1963 a National Geographic Society survey team measured it at over 367 feet and announced it as the tallest known living thing on earth. The magazine article that followed helped drive the public campaign that created Redwood National Park in 1968. An interpretive panel at the grove reproduces the photograph of the survey team running a tape up the trunk.

Then it lost the title. In 1994 the tree’s top died back, dropping it out of the rankings entirely — it now sits around 34th tallest on the planet. It’s still an enormous tree and still worth standing under. It’s just no longer the record holder, which is a useful thing to know before you hike four and a half miles expecting a champion.

The current tallest tree is Hyperion, at roughly 380 feet, found in 2006 in a different part of the park. You cannot visit it. The Park Service closed the area in 2022 after years of visitors trampling the ground around it into bare dirt, and going there now risks a $5,000 fine and up to six months in jail. It isn’t in the Tall Trees Grove and it isn’t on any trail.

Photography Notes

• Midday is workable here, which is unusual. The grove sits deep enough that direct sun rarely reaches the floor, so the light stays even longer than it does in an upland grove.
• The root plates are the best scale subject on this trail. Better than trunks, because the eye reads a cave-sized hole immediately.
• Shoot the maples. They’re a different texture and color from everything else, and almost nobody photographs them here.
• A wide lens and a vertical frame for the trunks; the trees are too tall to do anything else with.
• Bring a cloth. It’s damp on the flat even in July.

Know Before You Go

• Bring more than you think for a 4.5-mile hike. NPS specifically recommends food, water, sturdy shoes, rain gear, and a flashlight. That last one is because the climb out takes longer than people plan for.
• No dogs, on this or any trail in the redwood parks.
• No cell service on Bald Hills Road, the access road, or in the grove.
• The gate is locked behind you. Know your combination and don’t lose it.
• Redwood Creek crossings: the longer routes from the grove involve seasonal summer footbridges. The Tall Trees loop itself doesn’t require them, but check status if you plan to link trails.
• Pair it with Lady Bird Johnson Grove. Both trailheads are off Bald Hills Road, so you can do the easy upland loop and the strenuous valley hike in one outing if you have the legs.

If You Can’t Get a Permit

The Park Service is refreshingly blunt about this: they recommend the Prairie Creek–Foothill Trail Loop as an alternative, describing it as easy to reach, with redwoods just as tall, and much easier on the knees and heart.

That’s an unusual thing for a park to say about its own famous trail, and it’s worth taking at face value. If the permit doesn’t work out, you are not missing the only tall trees in the parks.

Is It Worth It?

Yes, but with a clearer set of conditions than any other hike in the redwoods.

Worth it if: you can plan a day ahead for the permit, you’re comfortable with an 800-foot climb at the end of a hike, and you’re driving something that fits down a narrow dirt road. The reward is a genuinely quiet old-growth flat, capped at 50 parties a day, in a park where the roadside groves can feel busy.

Not worth it if: you’re short on time, towing anything, or expecting to see the world’s tallest tree. The Libby Tree lost that title in 1994 and Hyperion is off-limits.

What stayed with me wasn’t the record-holder framing at all. It was the drive — seven miles up, a gate, six miles down — and then walking out onto a flat where the trees just kept going up.

For permits, current conditions, and road status, visit the National Park Service pages for the Tall Trees Grove hike and Redwood National and State Parks.