Two of the oldest coast redwoods in Sonoma County stand within five minutes of each other at Armstrong Redwoods, on flat ground a short walk from the car park. Colonel Armstrong is around 1,400 years old and 300 feet tall, named for the lumberman who set this stand aside instead of cutting it. The Parson Jones Tree is the taller of the two at over 310 feet and stands a hundred yards from the entrance. Both came through the Walbridge Fire in 2020. Day use fee, easy trail, evergreen all year.
0 of 2 visited in Guerneville
Photo: Sergei Mutovkin (CC BY 2.0)
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Colonel Armstrong
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · roughly 1,400 years · Pioneer Trail, about 0.5 miles from the reserve entrance
This redwood is named after a lumberman, which sounds like an insult and is not. Colonel James B. Armstrong made his money cutting Sonoma County forest in the 1870s and 1880s and then set this stand aside rather than felling it, which is why about 1,400 years of tree is still standing half a mile up the trail from the entrance. It is the oldest named tree in the reserve and around 300 feet tall. Estimates run from roughly 1,200 to 1,600 years, so even at the cautious end it was two centuries old at the time of the Norman conquest. In August 2020 the Walbridge Fire reached this grove and crews worked to hold it. The reserve burned at its edges and the old trees came through, which is less luck than bark: a coast redwood carries a foot of it, low in resin and hard to light. Armstrong died in 1900 and the tree has put on another century since. Getting to it is easy in a way the size does not prepare you for. State Parks charges about ten dollars per vehicle for the day, the trail is flat, and it is a fifteen-minute stroll from the car park. It is evergreen and looks the same in February as in August, so the only thing worth timing is the crowd.
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2
Parson Jones Tree
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · roughly 1,300 years · near the reserve entrance, about 100 yards from the parking lot
The tallest tree here is also the closest to the car park, about a hundred yards in on flat ground. The Parson Jones Tree runs over 310 feet, some 94.5 metres, which makes it taller than Colonel Armstrong, the older and more visited of the two. That height comes from survey work in the 1970s and does not appear to have been redone, so the number is half a century old; a redwood of this age adds height slowly, which makes the figure more likely stale than wrong. Age estimates land near 1,300 years, in a band from about 1,100 to 1,500, none of it from a ring count. What the height means on the ground is a trunk that leaves your field of view and carries on. There is no point from which the top and the base are visible at once, which is why photographs of it are uniformly disappointing and why people end up standing there longer than they meant to. Same entrance and same ten dollar vehicle fee as Colonel Armstrong, which is five minutes further along the same flat loop. The pair takes well under an hour. This is the one visitors underestimate, because a tree that close to the road is assumed to be the warm-up rather than the tallest thing in the reserve.
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