“There’s one they missed.” Terry Spreiter, a geologist with Redwood National Park, gestures toward a massive, gnarled redwood just downslope of the dirt road we’re driving on. Instead of the typical soaring, graceful redwood profile, this one is stunted and misshapen, the Quasimodo of the forest. “It was probably too funky for them,” Spreiter says as the ugly giant quickly disappears behind a screen of green alders.

Alders are everywhere along this road—on either side, down below and up above us, where they bend toward each other and form an overarching canopy. We are, it seems, tunneling through the forest, and though it is a spectacularly sunny October day in northwestern California, it is surprisingly dim inside this thicket of trees.

We eventually come out into the open, to a bright, flat clearing. Ahead, a yellow bulldozer sits idle. Off to the right stands a pile of fifteen or so fat redwood logs. Several appear to be six feet in diameter. One is probably eight feet across. “Those are pretty valuable, maybe $10,000 apiece,” Spreiter says as we get out of her government pickup. “We mill them right here and use them for signs and picnic tables.”

Like virtually everything around us, this break in the forest is the result of human handiwork. A former ridgeline, it was flattened to form a big log deck. Back in the 1950s, 1960s and early- to mid-1970s, at the height of the cutting, it was stacked full of redwood logs. “They’d pile them up in the summer and then haul them out in the winter,” Spreiter says.

Spreiter, a middle-aged woman with a relaxed, open air about her, starts walking down a side road, a “skid trail” where tractors used to drag logs out of the forest. Huge stumps poke up here and there, signs of the giants that once held sway over this rugged landscape, a scant three miles from the Pacific Ocean.

We stop at a viewpoint and look out over a sea of alder trees. In this part of California, at least, alder is what grows back first after an old-growth redwood forest is removed. The canopy is now thirty-feet high instead of 300 feet, a drop that has actually changed the weather. It’s hotter and drier now than it was. Spreiter estimates that it would be twenty degrees cooler where we’re standing now if the forest had never been cut. The rise in air temperatures near the ground has become a barrier to the huge fog bank that parks itself every summer off this part of California’s north coast. “The fog doesn’t come in as far, and it burns off more easily,” Spreiter says as she stands in a patch of sunlight. What that amounts to, she adds, is a significant drop in precipitation—an old-growth redwood forest, through interception, produces an astonishing eight inches of moisture every summer through fog drip.

As we walk on, Spreiter makes another startling comment. The ridge we are walking on used to be where the log deck is now. Bulldozers literally moved the ridge over to serve as fill for the roadbed. So steep was the natural contour of the land that a considerable terrace had to be built—the roadbed is twenty- to thirty-feet deep and contains not only earth but also tangled woody debris, the slash left over from logging. To keep the jumble of material in place, loggers anchored long pieces of wood known as “brow logs” between redwood stumps. The brow logs served as anchors and helped prevent the road from tumbling downhill.

This jerry-rigged style of road construction wouldn’t fly today, but it was standard operating procedure thirty years ago, before the state of California had any rules to speak of governing logging on private timberlands. This area, west of Redwood Creek—the main waterway in the park—used to be owned by Louisiana-Pacific Corporation. The land east of the creek was Simpson Timber Company territory. The two timber giants, along with a local company, Arcata Redwood, logged the bejesus out of the land that now makes up more than half of the 74,000-acre national park. The cutting frenzy reached a cres-cendo after 1968, when the park was first established. An effort to expand the park beyond its original 27,000 acres began almost as soon as the park was created. Managers understood that a buffer zone was needed between the centerpiece of the park—the Tall Trees Grove, located hard along Redwood Creek—and the commercial timberlands (in those days, the hornet-whine of chain saws could be heard from the grove itself).

But the expansion proposal was met with fierce opposition from locals who were economically dependent on the timber industry; and, of course, the proposal was also resisted by the timber industry itself, which had always viewed the extensive redwood forests in and around Redwood Creek as a financial bonanza. The debate dragged on for ten years, during which time L-P, Simpson and Arcata Redwood logged the forest immediately outside the park’s boundaries as fast as they could. When Congress finally approved a 48,000-acre expansion in 1978, it was hailed as a great conservation victory. Many believed that at last the Tall Trees Grove and associated redwoods along Redwood Creek, the so-called Emerald Mile, would be protected for all time. What was not widely understood—and is still not well known today—was that the almost equally magnificent forest upslope and on both sides of the famous riverside groves had been lost. Three-quarters of the land that was transferred to the park service—some 36,000 acres—was land that had been freshly logged.

Instead of a vast, primeval redwood forest that had stood for millennia, what the National Park Service got was literally bare ground. Bare ground marked with countless stumps. Bare ground etched with a maze of roads—more than 400 miles’ worth. Bare ground gouged by thousands of acres of landslides.

Still standing in that patch of sunlight, looking out at all the alders, Spreiter is remembering what the park looked like back then. “In 1980, when I started working here, all you could see was dirt and skid trails. I never thought I’d see that disappear.”

Appearances can be deceiving, especially in Redwood National Park. The typical visitor makes the trek to the Tall Trees Grove, or drives to Lady Bird Johnson Grove, or perhaps takes the short hike into Little Lost Man Creek and is treated to one of nature’s most humbling experiences: the magnificent, cathedral hush of a virgin redwood forest. The typical visitor has no idea that a huge swath of logged-over land surrounds these groves—much less that the damaged ground comprises a majority of the park itself.

The park service, of course, was aware of what was happening to the commercial timberlands during the controversy over the expansion. As a result, the agency knew when it finally took over those lands that they were not suitable for visitation—and wouldn’t be for some time. Congress knew that too—which is why, in the 1978 legislation, it authorized the park service to spend up to $33 million restoring the land. It was a radical step in a new direction for the agency charged with protecting Yellowstone and Yosemite. As the narrator of a 1997 park service video put it, the legislation “changed the concept that national park lands had to be pristine.”

It wasn’t just the newly acquired timberlands that were degraded. Much of the watershed in which the park was located had been intensively logged by the mid-1970s. A 1975 report by a panel of government scientists that assessed the condition of the entire 180,000-acre Redwood Creek watershed said that 65 percent of it—much of it Douglas-fir forest on commercial timberlands upstream of the park—had been heavily logged, all of it by tractor yarding, a particularly destructive logging technique. “Few examples exist of such extensive and intensive disturbance in a large watershed,” the report said.

The report said the logging had caused:

• A dramatic increase in landslides. A comparison of aerial photographs taken in 1947 (before major logging began) and in 1973 (at the height of the cutting) showed a more than tenfold increase—from 30 to 341—in the number of slides collapsing directly into Redwood Creek.

• A dramatic increase in aggradation, the transport of gravel and sediment into a stream by landslides, in Redwood Creek. Midway down the watershed, but still upstream from the park, bed elevations were fifteen feet higher in Redwood Creek in the mid-1970s than they were in the mid-1950s. At the Tall Trees Grove, the bed elevation of Redwood Creek had risen five to eight feet by the mid-1970s—high enough to directly threaten the grove with flooding during a major storm, which could spell doom for the shallow-rooted giants.

• A dramatic increase in the amount of sediment carried by streams. From 1971 through 1975, Redwood Creek transported about 16,000 pounds per square mile of suspended sediment. “This amount represents the greatest measured load per area of any stream of comparable size in the United States,” the report said.

• A stark difference in the amount of sediment washed into streams in cut areas compared to uncut areas. Streams draining uncut areas in the watershed carried far less sediment than streams draining cut-over areas in the watershed. Measurements taken of seven small tributaries of Redwood Creek during two storms revealed that streams coming out of logged areas carried eighty-one times as much sediment as streams coming out of unlogged areas.

• A stark difference in the volume of runoff coming from cut areas compared to uncut areas. Runoff from cut areas, according to one set of measurements, was as much as fifteen times greater than runoff from uncut areas.

The report concluded unequivocally that “accelerated erosion within Redwood Creek basin” was caused by “large-scale, tractor-yarded, clear-cut timber harvesting and associated road construction.” The report went on to warn that the watershed could be further degraded by the toppling of old-growth redwoods as stream banks erode; by the drowning and smothering of redwoods by flooding and sediment deposition; by the disappearance, due to aggradation, of deep pools that form critical fish habitat; and by the filling in with sediment of the gravels that fish such as salmon need for spawning.

Once the expansion was finalized, the first step taken by the park service to clean up the mess was to revegetate the land—primarily by planting willows on barren slopes. The goal was to slow erosion. But a problem quickly became clear: the roadfills that made up so much of the landscape were often twenty to thirty feet deep—far deeper than willow roots could reach. As a result, when the roadfills began to slide, they simply took the willows with them (it would soon become clear that it wasn’t necessary to revegetate the land anyway; nature proved it could do the job far better when, in just a few years, alder saplings started popping up everywhere).

Another tactic employed by the park service was to install small wooden “check dams” to slow runoff. This worked for a time. But the dams rotted and decayed in a matter of years in the sopping-wet climate (the park receives an average of eighty inches of rain each year).

What the park service didn’t understand in these early years was the extent to which logging had altered the landscape. The staggering density of the road network, and the practice of using whatever material was at hand to build roadbeds, meant that much of the land underfoot was nothing but roadfill. Also contributing to the extraordinary amount of unstable soil was a logging practice that, if anything, was even more destructive than tractor yarding: the bulldozing of relatively flat areas called “layouts” that served as giant cushions for the redwoods to fall upon after they were cut. The purpose was to prevent the giants from shattering on impact—which would reduce their value as lumber. But while layouts may have made commercial sense, they were disastrous to the environment. “The layouts are what tore up the land,” says Ernie Larkin, a former logger who is now a contract worker in the park service’s restoration effort.

Another harmful—and extremely common—practice was the construction of “Humboldt crossings,” named after the Northern California county that is in the middle of redwood country. In building Humboldt crossings, loggers placed several redwood logs lengthwise in a stream and then buried them in dirt, creating bridges for trucks and other heavy equipment. Aside from being direct intrusions into streams, Humboldt crossings had the drawback of getting easily clogged and causing streams to back up and flow somewhere else—an event that invariably led to gullying (the logs from unearthed Humboldt crossings provide the wood for the park service’s small milling operation).

The extent of the destruction caused by these sorts of logging practices is hard to comprehend. But Wendell Larkin, one of Ernie Larkin’s sons (and, like his dad, a worker involved in the ongoing restoration effort at the park), tells a story that gives a sense of the havoc that was wreaked. When he was a boy, Wendell had a favorite fishing spot deep in a redwood forest. One summer, he proposed to his dad that they go fishing there. His dad told him they couldn’t.

“I asked him, ‘How come, Dad? Aren’t there any fish there anymore?’ And my dad took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Son, there isn’t a stream there anymore.’”

As park service personnel went about their restoration work, they eventually came to a mind-boggling realization: the land they were trying to heal—large portions of it, at least—was buried. The only solution was to dig it out and return it to its original contours. And the only way to do that was to use the tool that had caused the problem in the first place: heavy equipment.

This explains why Spreiter and I, though we are in a national park, have donned yellow hardhats and are trying our best not to get run over by a couple of bulldozers that, for all the world, appear to be tearing the heck out of a mountainside. Spreiter approaches the driver, who turns off the engine, jumps down onto the mass of upturned earth and explains what’s going on.

“Basically, we’re trying to find the topsoil,” says Warner Larkin, yet another of Ernie Larkin’s boys. “One way to do that is to find a stump. Once you get to the bottom of the stump, you’re there. Another way is to just dig and dig through all this loose stuff until you hit bare ground. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Once the original forest floor is located, the natural contour of the land becomes clear. The restoration work then becomes simply a matter of trucking away the dirt and woody debris that used to comprise the roadfill and smoothing what’s left. The goal is to approximate as closely as possible the drainage patterns that existed before the logging. “What we’re trying to do is unearth stream channels,” Spreiter says. Although this method leaves behind bare ground that is susceptible to eroding, it doesn’t remain bare long, because the mineral-rich topsoil revegetates quickly.

And this method is certainly preferable to seeing the old roadbeds collapse in a heavy rainstorm. That’s what happened on New Year’s Day in 1997, when torrential rains triggered as many as 150 landslides within the park. Three of the biggest broke loose from the same stretch of road at about the same time. So close were the slides—all three within a quarter-mile of each other—that they merged into one giant debris flow that deposited 30,000cubic yards of sediment (3,000 dump truck loads) into McArthur Creek, a tributary of Redwood Creek. The cost of cleaning up the mess is estimated at $100,000. “We haven’t got to it yet,” Spreiter says.

To date, after twenty-two years, the restoration effort has removed over half of the 445 miles of logging roads within the park’s boundaries. A significant accomplishment, but Spreiter says all the roads would have been gone by now if the park service had been given the $33 million authorized by Congress for the work in one big chunk. Instead, the restoration effort has been funded on a year-by-year basis. That has yielded less bang for the buck simply because inflation—in the form of increased salaries and equipment costs—has eaten away at the money. Also, the amount the park service has chosen to allocate each year hasn’t always been consistent. Annual funding has varied from as little as $75,000 to as much as $2 million. That’s where it’s at now. If it stays there, park service documents say, the roads will be completely obliterated in seventeen years. If funding drops, the job could take as long as sixty or seventy years.

The restoration effort has its critics. Robert Ziemer of the U.S. Forest Service’s Redwood Sciences Laboratory in Arcata, California, says road obliteration is time-consuming and costly. He believes a cheaper alternative—one that would accomplish just as much in terms of reducing sediment loads to waterways—would be to shore up the existing roads and install “water bars” or “rolling dips” to make sure that water crosses the roads and proceeds downhill rather than down the roads themselves.

He also says that more emphasis should have been placed by now on addressing the main source of sediment deposition in the Redwood Creek basin: the private timberlands upstream of the park that occupy the upper two-thirds of the watershed. “If all of the money that was expended for restoration within the park could have been used in the entire Redwood Creek basin to reduce erosion sources on both private and public lands, I think you would have seen by now a much greater response in terms of protecting park resources downstream.”

That more hasn’t been accomplished in the upper part of the basin is due in part to poor relations between landowners and park service officials. Things have improved significantly in recent years, however. Since 1995, the park service, working with landowners, has upgraded twenty-seven miles of logging roads to current standards. It has decommissioned another sixteen miles of roads and is in the process of inventorying the entire road network in order to identify problem areas. However, to some extent, this work has been canceled out by the fact that nearly forty miles of new logging roads have been built in the upper basin since 1992. Under current California regulations, such roads have to be maintained for only three years after a logging operation.

There are signs of improvement in the ecological health of Redwood Creek. Some of the deep pools that once made the waterway a first-class salmon stream are coming back, and the bed elevations that had risen so drastically by the early 1970s because of gravel accumulation have come back down a bit. Near the Tall Trees Grove, for example, the bed has dropped two to four feet over the past twenty-seven years. The creek, in other words, is slowly flushing itself out.

But the last twenty-odd years have been relatively dry, and there hasn’t been a huge storm since 1964. When one comes, as it eventually will, park service scientists know what will happen. “When a big storm hits, the whole system will come loose” is how David Anderson, a fisheries biologist, puts it.

That knowledge is part of the reason Spreiter from time to time leaves the land of alder and redwood stumps that she works in and heads for the old growth, the forest of 2,000-year-old giants that the loggers never got to. “Every time I go there, I get recharged,” Spreiter says.