Where Are the Giant Redwood Trees Located?

Giant redwood trees grow naturally in only two places on Earth, both in the western United States. Coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), the tallest trees on the planet, occupy a narrow strip along the Pacific coast from southwestern Oregon to central California. Giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum), the most massive trees by volume, survive in roughly 75 scattered groves on the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada. Despite their shared “redwood” name and membership in the same botanical family, these two species live in strikingly different environments separated by hundreds of miles, and the forces keeping each one in its particular patch of ground are worth understanding.

The Coast Redwood Belt

Coast redwoods grow along a remarkably thin ribbon of coastline. Their native range stretches from two small groves on the Chetco River in the extreme southwest corner of Oregon southward about 450 miles to Salmon Creek Canyon in the Santa Lucia Mountains of southern Monterey County, California. That strip is generally only 5 to 35 miles wide, hemmed in on the east by the drier conditions of California’s interior valleys and on the west by the ocean itself.¹ The tallest known individuals, reaching over 350 feet, stand in protected pockets of Humboldt and Del Norte counties in far northern California, where fog, rainfall, and alluvial soils create ideal growing conditions.

Major parks and preserves within this belt include Redwood National and State Parks (a combined complex near Crescent City), Humboldt Redwoods State Park along the Avenue of the Giants, Muir Woods National Monument just north of San Francisco, and Big Basin Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The distribution is not uniform across the 450-mile belt. The densest, tallest stands cluster in the northern half where rainfall can exceed 80 inches per year. As you move south past San Francisco Bay, the groves become patchier and smaller, hugging canyon bottoms and north-facing slopes where moisture lingers.

Why Fog Matters for Coast Redwoods

The coast redwood’s tight coastal range is no accident. Biogeographical, physiological, and paleoecological evidence all point to a close association between these trees and the presence of summer marine fog along the Pacific coast.² California’s summers are dry, but along the coast, cold ocean currents generate a regular fog layer that drifts inland during the night and morning hours. Redwoods can absorb moisture directly through their needles and bark, and the drip from fog-laden canopies keeps the soil moist during months with little rain. Inland from the fog zone, the air is too dry and hot; farther south, the fog season is shorter and less reliable. The boundaries of the fog belt and the boundaries of the redwood belt overlap to a degree that has led researchers to describe the two as essentially inseparable.

This fog dependency also explains why coast redwoods do not simply march inland where the soil is perfectly fine. Just a few miles from the coast, summer temperatures spike and humidity plummets, and redwoods give way to Douglas-fir, tanoak, and eventually oak woodland. The transition can be surprisingly abrupt.

Giant Sequoia Groves in the Sierra Nevada

Giant sequoias occupy a completely different landscape. They grow in about 75 groves scattered along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, concentrated at elevations roughly between 5,900 and 6,900 feet (1,800 to 2,100 meters).³⁴ The groves span a roughly 260-mile stretch of the range, from a small northern outlier in Placer County down through the southern Sierra. The largest concentration of groves sits in and around Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, with additional clusters in Giant Sequoia National Monument and parts of Yosemite National Park.

Unlike the coast redwoods’ continuous strip, giant sequoia groves are fragmented. They dot the landscape as isolated pockets separated by miles of mixed-conifer forest where sequoias are absent. Some groves contain just a few dozen mature trees, while others, like the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park, hold thousands. The largest individual tree by trunk volume, the General Sherman Tree, stands there. Individual groves often occupy drainage bottoms, meadow edges, and gentle slopes where groundwater or snowmelt keeps the soil reliably moist through the dry summer months. These trees depend less on fog and more on deep snowpack that melts slowly through the growing season.

Why the Groves Are Isolated from Each Other

The patchy distribution of giant sequoias has long puzzled visitors. Why 75 separate groves instead of one continuous forest? Part of the answer is geological. Giant sequoias seem to favor particular soil types and moisture conditions that occur in discrete patches along the Sierra’s western slope. The species associates with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi rather than the ectomycorrhizal fungi used by most surrounding conifers, which hints at specific soil biology requirements.⁵

Genetic studies confirm that this fragmentation has real biological consequences. Researchers have found limited gene flow between adjacent groves, particularly in the northern part of the range where the gaps between groves are widest. In the southern portion, groves show more connectivity, though even that degrades to isolation at the extreme south end. Geographic distance is the strongest predictor of genetic differences between groves, with precipitation and temperature conditions explaining a smaller but meaningful slice of the variation.⁶ A separate genomic analysis found strong genetic differentiation among many of the northern populations, with little mixing between them.⁷ In practical terms, each grove is something like a small genetic island, shaped by the particular conditions of its location over thousands of years.

Where to See Them in Person

If you want to stand among these trees, you have several well-established options depending on which species you are after. For coast redwoods, the most popular destinations cluster in two zones. In the far north, Redwood National and State Parks protect some of the tallest old-growth stands accessible by trail, including the Tall Trees Grove along Redwood Creek. Farther south, Humboldt Redwoods State Park contains the Rockefeller Forest, often cited as the world’s largest remaining contiguous old-growth coast redwood forest. For visitors based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Muir Woods offers a cathedral-like grove reachable by a short drive from the city, though it is famously crowded.

For giant sequoias, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks are the marquee destinations, home to the General Sherman Tree and the Congress Trail, which winds among dozens of enormous specimens. Yosemite National Park’s Mariposa Grove, near the park’s southern entrance, offers another easily accessible collection of large sequoias. Calaveras Big Trees State Park in the central Sierra is less visited but equally impressive, and it holds historical significance as the place where the wider world first learned of giant sequoias in the 1850s. A few groves on national forest land, including the Trail of 100 Giants in Giant Sequoia National Monument, see lighter foot traffic and feel more remote.

Old-Growth Versus Second-Growth Forests

Many visitors to the redwood region are surprised to learn that the vast majority of the original old-growth coast redwood forest has been logged. Estimates typically place the surviving old growth at around 5 percent of what existed before commercial logging began in the mid-1800s. What remains is concentrated in parks and preserves, particularly in the far north. The rest of the range is covered in second-growth forest, much of it on private timber land, where redwoods are present but structurally different from old growth.

Research at Redwood National Park illustrates the contrast. In old-growth riparian forests there, coast redwood dominates the canopy in terms of stem density and overall importance. In adjacent second-growth forests that were logged decades ago, the canopy is instead dominated by red alder, Douglas-fir, and younger redwood that has not yet reached its full stature.⁸ The good news is that coast redwoods are vigorous resprouters. Cut stumps send up rings of new shoots, which is why you often see “fairy ring” circles of younger trees surrounding the base of an ancient stump. Given enough time and protection from further cutting, these second-growth stands can gradually regain structural complexity, though the process takes centuries.

Giant sequoias were less extensively logged, partly because their wood is brittle and shatters when a felled tree hits the ground, making it a poor commercial timber species compared to coast redwood. Most giant sequoia groves received some form of protection relatively early, though a few were heavily logged in the late 1800s, including portions of what is now Giant Sequoia National Monument.

Wildfire and the Threat to Giant Sequoia Groves

The location of giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevada places them squarely in the path of California’s intensifying wildfire crisis, and the results over the past decade have been alarming. Between 2015 and 2024, about 82 percent of giant sequoia grove area burned in wildfire, compared to just 24 percent in the entire period from 1910 to 2014.⁹ A conservative estimate puts the losses at roughly 18 percent of all large giant sequoias killed by wildfire since 1984, with the overwhelming majority of those deaths occurring in the 2020 Castle Fire and the 2021 KNP Complex and Windy fires.

Giant sequoias evolved with fire and historically depended on low-intensity ground burns to clear competing vegetation and open their cones for seed release. But a century of fire suppression allowed dense undergrowth and ladder fuels to accumulate, so that when fire does arrive now it often burns at intensities the trees cannot survive. The bark of a giant sequoia can be two feet thick at the base and withstand moderate flames, but crown fires that leap from the understory into the canopy can kill even the largest individuals. About 13 percent of the species’ total range is now considered at risk of local extirpation, meaning the loss of mature seed-producing trees combined with limited predicted regeneration could cause groves to disappear entirely.⁹

Post-fire assessments of individual groves paint a similarly sobering picture. Areas that experienced the most severe fire saw tree mortality spike sharply while giant sequoia seedling density simultaneously dropped, creating a double problem: fewer parent trees and fewer offspring to replace them.¹⁰ The National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service have responded with emergency fuel-reduction projects around key groves, including prescribed burns and mechanical thinning, but the backlog of untreated acreage is enormous.

Climate Change and Shifting Ranges

Both redwood species face an uncertain geographic future as the climate warms. For coast redwoods, modeling based on historical climate variation suggests that a warmer scenario with normal precipitation would shrink the climatically suitable area by about 50 percent, with no suitable habitat remaining south of San Francisco Bay. That southern contraction is partially offset by an expansion of suitable conditions northward, with roughly a 34 percent gain in area in the northern part of the range.¹¹ The stable core of the future range, under that scenario, would be the central coastal portion of the current distribution. If conditions become both warmer and drier, the picture gets considerably worse, with a projected 79 percent reduction in suitable area.¹¹

For giant sequoias, rising temperatures and declining snowpack threaten the moisture conditions that sustain the groves, particularly at the lower-elevation end of their range. The trees that exist today are remnants of a distribution that was broader during cooler, wetter periods in the past. Each grove occupies what amounts to a moisture refuge, and as the climate dries, those refuges shrink. Southern groves at the edge of the range face the greatest stress.

None of this means that redwoods will disappear in our lifetimes. Both species are extremely long-lived (coast redwoods can exceed 2,000 years, giant sequoias over 3,000), and existing mature trees can endure considerable climate variation. But recruitment of new young trees depends on conditions being right at the ground level, and that is where climate change bites hardest. A mature redwood that survives a hotter, drier decade may not produce seedlings that can establish successfully in the same spot.

Redwoods Planted Outside Their Native Range

Though naturally restricted to California and a sliver of Oregon, coast redwoods have been planted widely around the world since the 19th century. You can find them growing in parks, estates, and commercial plantations in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, parts of southern Europe, and scattered locations along the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States and Canada. New Zealand in particular has seen increasing interest in coast redwoods as a plantation timber species due to favorable growth rates there.¹² Trials using clones from across the species’ native range have found that trees from different California origins grow at broadly similar rates in New Zealand conditions, with no strong trend linking a clone’s home provenance to its performance abroad.

Giant sequoias have also been planted ornamentally across temperate regions of the world, especially in western Europe, where Victorian-era collectors were fascinated by their size. Some of these planted specimens are now over 150 years old and impressively large, though none approach the dimensions of wild trees growing in Sierra Nevada groves where conditions have favored the species for millennia. Researchers have begun exploring whether assisted migration, deliberately establishing new groves in areas outside the current native range, could serve as a conservation hedge against climate-driven losses in the Sierra Nevada.³ Early trials show promise, though the approach raises ecological and ethical questions about introducing a species to landscapes where it has never grown naturally.

Telling the Two Species Apart

Because both trees are commonly called “redwoods,” visitors frequently conflate them. The distinction matters when you are planning a trip or trying to understand the ecology. Coast redwoods grow at or near sea level in foggy, mild, coastal conditions. Their foliage is flat and fern-like, resembling hemlock needles. Their bark is deeply furrowed and fibrous, and the trees are extraordinarily slender relative to their height, often topping 300 feet but with trunks only 10 to 15 feet in diameter.

Giant sequoias grow in mountain terrain with cold, snowy winters. Their foliage is scale-like and prickly, more closely resembling a cedar or cypress than the flat sprays of coast redwood. Their trunks are massively wide, sometimes exceeding 25 feet in diameter at the base, giving them a stocky, monumental appearance. They are shorter than the tallest coast redwoods, rarely exceeding 280 feet, but they far outweigh them in total mass. The bark of giant sequoias is thicker, more spongy, and lighter in color, ranging from cinnamon to pinkish-orange. If the bark looks like compressed cotton and feels almost spongy when you press it, you are standing next to a giant sequoia.

A third species sometimes grouped under the “redwood” umbrella is the dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), native to a small area of central China. Dawn redwoods are deciduous, much smaller, and grow in a completely different hemisphere. They are popular as ornamental trees in parks worldwide but have no natural presence in California.