Trees & Trains

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The Roaring Camp train at Cathedral Grove, Henry Cowell Redwood State Park, Felton, California.

There are two ways to get to the Cathedral Redwood Grove near the crest of Bear Mountain in the Felton redwoods of Henry Cowell Redwood State Park: on foot or by train. When you’ve got kids, grandkids, with you, you take the train.

The train is a fun ride to the top, and the conductor makes the ride fun. Cathedral Grove lives up to its name. And once the crowd returns from its visit back on to the train, if you ask nicely, the conductor will hold the train while you set up a tripod and capture the image you envisioned.

We haven’t been here since before the millennium. And except for the ease of buying tickets (and even ordering box meals) on line well ahead of time, nothing has changed. And that’s a good thing. 

Felton Redwoods Cathedral Grove
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Ecclesiae: Felton Redwoods Cathedral Grove

Cathedral Grove earns its name from the inside — the old-growth coast redwoods here rise as columns, their trunks too vertical and too regular to read as trees in the conventional sense. The canopy closes overhead in the way vaulted ceilings do, at a height that makes the space simultaneously intimate and enormous. Made after the Roaring Camp train returned to the station and the grove emptied, the image titled Ecclesiae holds the redwoods in the brief interval when the light falls through cleanly, without competing presence. Henry Cowell Redwood State Park sits in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where old-growth coast redwood survived in scattered pockets — and this grove is among the most intact.

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