Big Tree Loop Trail

Having hiked the Lady Bird Johnson Grove trail and the Trillium Falls trail, we finished out our first day at Redwoods National Park by hiking one more short trail.

The Prairie Creek Visitor Center is like grand central station for hiking in the redwoods.  There are numerous trailheads and connector trails located in this area which makes it a popular destination and a tough place to find a parking spot.

Pick a trail, any trail - lots to choose from.

After eating our lunch and being stalked by a Steller's Jay, we began our hike of the Big Tree Loop trail. This loop takes the Prairie Creek trail up to the Big Tree area where it connects with the Foothill trail and then the Cathedral Tree trail before finishing back at the visitor center.  This hike is 3.2 miles and takes you through some of the biggest redwoods in the park and is another of those great introduction hikes to the park.

Beware the stalking Steller's Jay

The trail begins with a large wooden bridge that crosses Prairie Creek and takes you quickly into groves of large redwood trees.  Following our map closely (since there are many trails branching off from this access) we successfully turned off this trail and onto the Prairie Creek trail.

Time to hike!

Wooden bridge area at start of our hike.  The trees are part of the bridge!

Although we would not hike all of the Prairie Creek trail, we hiked enough to enjoy various views of the creek while being constantly surrounded by large redwood trees.  There are benches at different points of this trail for those who want to go at a slower pace or just take in the surroundings.

One of many bench areas along this beautiful trail.

We did encounter a couple of down redwood trees across the trail.  Since these trees are too big to move off the trail, tunnels were cut through them allowing us to walk through two different redwood trees.

One of the two tree tunnels on the Prairie Creek trail

Carol & Glenn at the tunnel tree

Carol & Maggie at the tunnel tree

The trail eventually took us to the Drury Parkway, which is a scenic 13 mile stretch of road through the park.  We crossed the parkway and instead of taking a direct trail to the Big Tree Area, we walked down the parkway to a Hunnewell-Donald Memorial Grove sign per a hiking guide suggestion.  This route would connect with the Foothill trail and then the Cathedral Trees trail and provide us with more redwoods and less noise from Drury Parkway, both of which sounded good to us.

As we hiked along the Foothill trail we somehow missed the Big Tree (hard to do when it is the largest redwood tree (girth) from top to bottom).  Apparently we should have turned right when we turned left or something like that.  We still saw plenty of beautiful giant redwoods, especially when we reached the Cathedral Tree trail.

Big Trees!

As our hike neared its end, we reached the Drury Parkway again.  We hiked up the embankment and crossed, arriving back at the Prairie Creek Visitor Center to complete our first day of hiking.

Day 1 -- 3 hikes -- 7.4 miles. -- amazing beauty!  What a great start to our visit.

Now it was time to get some rest as our hike on day 2 would be one of the top redwood hikes in the world and a challenging 11.6 miles in length.

Trekking Together
Glenn & Carol (& Maggie too)