Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park was one of the highlights of our Northern California coast road trip. Exploring in the lush, fern-covered canyon was a surreal, one-of-a-kind hiking experience.
Oddly enough, one of the best hikes in all of the Redwood National and State Parks is one where you probably aren’t paying attention to any redwoods at all. You’ll be too mesmerized by the tapestry of ferns covering the 50-foot walls of the narrow canyon. The scene is so otherworldly that scenes from Jurassic Park and Walking with Dinosaurs were filmed here.
The drive on Davison Road to get to the trailhead on Gold Bluffs Beach is quite an experience in itself. If your first exposure to a Redwood forest had previously just been in the more southern Humboldt Redwoods State Park, you’ll probably be just as amazed as we were by the lush understory of the forest you drive through. It was, until we visited Jedidiah Smith the next day, the thickest forest we had ever seen.
Once you emerge from the forest onto the beach, you’ll have to pay $8 or have a National Parks Pass to access Gold Bluffs Beach. This is one of the only fee areas of any of the redwood parks, which says something about how popular it is. The road along the beach is a little rough and probably wouldn’t be suitable for our 2WD rental if there had been heavy rain, but we were lucky with the weather.
We arrived at the trailhead around 10:30 am and there were only a few other cars in the parking lot. Keep it mind, winter is “off-season,” however we highly recommend visiting then because California coast winters are incredibly mild, and the moisture keeps the redwood forests lush year-round. Also when we got back, even in winter, the parking lot was almost full, so you can imagine what it would be like in summer…
The hike starts off along the beach with a warning sign about very aggressive elk (good news: we didn’t run into any), until after a few minutes you’ll see the entrance to the canyon on the right.
Entering Fern Canyon is like entering another world:
Be sure to wear waterproof shoes or shoes you don’t mind getting wet, because you will have to walk through the water at some point. The entire hike is through a flowing creek bed that, depending on the season and water height, may have some wood bridges installed, but there were none when we were there. Check in with the visitor center to see the water levels.
The hike is short and goes by quickly – we wish it was longer! Although the hike can be done as a loop, we took some advice we read online to turn around and go back the way we came to enjoy the best parts of the hike.
Fern Canyon is by far one of the most unique hikes we have ever done and we highly recommend it to everyone!
