Boy Scout Tree

Published by

Caitlyn

on

December 17, 2025

Here’s the thing. It’s not that this trail wasn’t a nice little redwood walk, but after being in the redwoods for the past 7+ days… they all start to blend together into one jumbo pile of neck-breaking trees.

The Boy Scout Tree Trail is a five-ish mile walk in the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park section. The trailhead is located off Howland Hill Road, which is a redwoods must-see in and of itself. It’s a one-lane dirt road where the trees are right against you.

You pass the tiny parking area at the trailhead for the Boy Scout Tree on the way to where it dead ends at the Grove of the Titans which is what most people come over there for. (There are bathrooms!)

I really love how the park system put these signs that acknowledge the indigenous communities that were/are the original stewards of this land. What’s nice about the Redwoods Park System conglomerate is that not all of the current silly national government decisions negatively impact them because most of the parts are majority state-managed instead, so hopefully these get to stick around. 🙂

The Boy Scout Tree trail dead ends at Fern Falls which is supposed to be pretty cute, but by this point in the season (September), we’d heard that it becomes dried up into the tiniest trickle.

As I’m writing this, I see that everything past the first mile Boy Scout Tree is closed from Nov 2025 – May 1, 2026. Huh, interesting. Apparently this is the wet season and they’re worried about further muddy erosion. Note that you will NOT be able to see the Boy Scout Tree if this is the case, it’s about 1.5 miles past that point.

The trail is a pretty easy meander on the squishy redwood mulch while dodging roots along the way, same as most trails in this area.

It wasn’t super muddy when we were there, but I can see how it could easily become that way.

When you finally make it the 2.5-ish miles in to the actual Boy Scout Tree, you have to basically scale a 45 degree angled dirt wall using roots as handholds. I would not wanna be doing that with the squish too, it was already so sketchy. On the way down, I did some sit-and-scoots (no shame) and so did everyone else.

The Boy Scout Tree itself is super cool because it’s actually two trees that merged into each other. The tree is 240 feet tall and 23 feet in diameter. Wild.

Along the way, there’s all the classic things that make Redwood National & State Parks so iconic – the vast array of different shapes and sizes of ferns, the intense relaxing calm of the air, and of course the impossibly tall trees that stand and have fallen all around you.

The Boy Scout Tree was apparently discovered by a Del Norte County (where Jedediah Redwoods State Park is) sheriff – Jack Breen – who was the leader of a Boy Scout troop.

Below is a photo of their little troop hanging out at the base of the tree and I think it’s so damn cute to imagine us standing in the same place. If you close your eyes while you’re there, you can almost see ’em. 🙂

Even though the trail is relatively flat, but that’s not to say it’s easy. Climbing under and over fallen trees is a must, and like I said there’s this whole little dirt wall situation you gotta get up and down. Hiking poles are super helpful.

Of course we had to have a little snacky break when we finally got to the tree. There’s a bunch of fallen trunks arranged in kind of like an amphitheater shape around the tree, I bet they do ranger presentations or something up there.

It makes a nice little space where even though there were other people around, we weren’t on top of each other.

Look at these little cuties…

Fun to imagine us all enjoying this big guy over the past hundred-ish years, ya know?

I felt that the way to the tree wasn’t that intuitive, the hill you climb kinda doubles back on the trail in the direction of that labelled arrow. You probably won’t be alone while you’re here though, so likely you can just follow the sound of the other hikers.

We were headed to Oregon after this! Our first time. Just a little overnight dip to see the infamous Samuel H. Boardman Scenic Corridor. I was buzzing on the walk out of here knowing that’s what was coming next.

The Jedediah Smith Redwoods is the most northern part of the Redwoods Park System and probably less than a twenty minute drive from the Oregon border. Weeeee