The Avenue of the Giants is a thirty-one-mile stretch of old highway that runs parallel to Highway 101 through the Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and the moment you turn onto it the light changes. The trees are coast redwoods, the tallest living things on the planet, with trunks as wide as a small room and tops that disappear a hundred metres overhead. The air is cool and damp, the forest floor is thick with ferns and sorrel, and sound seems to vanish into the huge trunks. It is the sort of place where riders instinctively lower the revs.
The grove was saved from logging in the 1920s by the Save the Redwoods League, which bought stands of ancient forest from timber companies, and the state park has grown to cover more than fifty thousand acres. Along the way you pass memorial groves such as Founders Grove, where the Dyerville Giant, a tree more than three hundred feet tall, lay on the ground after it fell in 1991. The nearby Eel River tore through this valley in the great floods of 1955 and 1964, washing away bridges and whole villages, and flood marks on the roadside buildings in Weott and Myers Flat show how high the water rose.
The riding is calm and unhurried. The old road follows the river, with gentle bends, wide shoulders in places, and very little in the way of hairpins, but the big trees often crowd close to the tarmac, which gives an unforgettable sense of scale. Speed limits are low, and rightly so. Shade keeps the surface damp, and redwood needles, cones and fallen branches make for slippery patches, particularly after rain. The air smells of resin and damp earth, and in the early morning the light shafts through the canopy.
Garberville, at the southern end, has pumps, and Fortuna, about thirty-four kilometres from here, is the nearest larger town with the full range of services. Rio Dell is closer, but smaller. Small villages along the way have cafes and general stores, some of them very quaint, and the visitor centre has a good small museum on the forest ecology. Summer fog can linger until midday, so a warm layer is welcome, and the weekdays are quieter than weekends.