Bald Hills Road

Getting Oriented

The signed exit sits on U.S. 101 about a mile north of Orick, at the southern end of Redwood National and State Parks. The Park Service and California State Parks manage the place jointly, 131,983 acres of federal and state land, 71,715 of it federal. The road belongs to Humboldt County. Running east, it crosses park land, private land, and the Six Rivers National Forest before reaching Weitchpec on the Klamath River.

The Bald Hills are named for the grasslands that sit above the forest. The climb out of Orick starts in old-growth and second-growth redwood and tops out on prairie, hitting a steep 15 percent pitch on the way up. School House Peak reaches 3,068 feet, and the Lyons Ranch Trailhead at mile 17 sits at roughly 2,500 feet.

The Route

Pavement carries the first 13 miles, and the surface turns to gravel past that, dusty through summer. The road is winding, narrow, and rough. The Park Service puts 45 minutes on the one-way drive to the Lyons Ranch Trailhead and two to six hours on the whole outing once the stops are counted.

Most visitors drive the first three miles to the Lady Bird Johnson Grove parking area and go no farther. Past it the road empties out. The Park Service names the Lyons Ranch Trailhead, 17 miles east of the highway, as the turn-around for a trip back to U.S. 101, and the county road keeps going east from there.

Stops Along the Way

Listed west to east from the highway.

• Lady Bird Johnson Grove sits at mile three, where a footbridge carries walkers from the parking area over the road to the grove trail.
• Redwood Creek Overlook looks down the Redwood Creek valley, where the dark-green old growth stands out against the lighter second growth on hillsides clearcut in the 1960s and 1970s. Interpretive panels show that contrast and the restoration work the parks have run since the late 1970s, and one of the picnic tables carries Francisco X. Alarcón's poem "Never Alone," installed under Ada Limón's You Are Here: Poetry in Parks project. Fog and cloud can hide the view. Parking and a vault toilet.
• Tall Trees Trailhead is the one stop behind a locked gate, six miles of dirt off Bald Hills Road. The reservation is free but required year round, issued online only through the Redwood Parks Conservancy, and the gate code arrives by email. The lot will not take RVs over 21 feet or vehicles towing trailers, and the hike runs 4.5 miles round trip with an 800-foot drop in the first 1.5.
• Dolason Prairie Trailhead stands above the fog line, which the Park Service rates for night-sky viewing. A ten-mile trail drops from here past a 19th-century barn and 2,500 feet down into Redwood and Emerald creeks. Kiosk, parking, picnic table, vault toilet.
• Lyons Ranch Trailhead ends the Park Service's 17 miles, with gravel parking for about a dozen cars, no water, and no facilities. A four-mile round trip drops 400 feet along old dirt roads to the ranch.

The Lyons Ranch

A redwood barn, orchards, and a scatter of outbuildings sit on open prairie at the bottom of that hike, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018 as a 5,660-acre district. The ranching period ran from 1868 to 1959. Jonathan Lyons came west from Iowa around 1850 and settled in the Hoopa Valley about 1861. His wife Amelia was Hupa, and the large redwood planks in the barn were fabricated with 19th-century equipment and construction techniques the Yurok and Hupa had used for millennia.

Three generations ran sheep across as many as eight of the Bald Hills prairies. The Lyons were among the first Merino breeders in the United States, and Jonathan and Amelia took a gold medal for wool quality at the Paris Exposition. Their grandson Gene Lyons graduated from the College of Agriculture at Davis, now UC Davis, the first Native American to do so by the Park Service's account, and his will endowed a graduate stipend there after his death in 1972.

Where to Camp

No campground sits on Bald Hills Road. The parks' four developed campgrounds are all elsewhere, with Jedediah Smith, Prairie Creek, and Gold Bluffs Beach open year round and Mill Creek in summer, all at $35 per site per night through Reserve California at 1-800-444-7275.

Backcountry camping anywhere in the parks needs a permit, issued online rather than at visitor centers. Elam Backcountry Camp is 6.5 miles on foot from the Tall Trees Trailhead, with three sites, a vault toilet, non-potable water, and a hitching post for stock. Redwood Creek can be impossible to cross in the rainy season or at high flow, and the two bridges over it go in seasonally, usually June through September.

Vehicle and Timing

Nothing in the Park Service's description of this road calls for four-wheel drive or high clearance. The restriction is on size. It advises against driving the route in a motorhome or RV, or towing a trailer on it, and the Tall Trees spur makes that a rule with its 21-foot cap and trailer ban.

The 45-minute estimate covers driving and nothing else. Tall Trees alone takes at least four hours including the round-trip drive and hike, against the two to six hours allotted for the whole outing.

Access and Closures

The Park Service lists this road as a year-round route, and the parks themselves are always open. Snow can cover the upper part of the road in winter, which the Park Service says also makes the Lyons Ranch trail hard to walk. Prescribed fire runs in the Bald Hills in autumn when conditions allow, and that burning is what keeps the prairies open; the Lyons used traditional cultural burning to the same end until the federal government outlawed the practice in the 1930s, and fire did not come back to these prairies for another fifty years.

Road conditions and fire operations post to the park's current conditions page. Read it before committing to the full 17 miles, and call the parks at 707-464-6101 if one particular stop is the reason for the trip. Caltrans posts closures and construction on U.S. 101 itself to its QuickMap.

Redwood National Park charges no entrance fee, and the drive needs no permit of its own.

Fuel and Water

No fuel and no water are available anywhere along the road, and the Lyons Ranch Trailhead has no facilities of any kind. Vault toilets are at the Redwood Creek Overlook and the Dolason Prairie Trailhead. Summer up on the prairies runs far hotter than the coast, so carry sunscreen and more water than a coastal day would need. Orick, a mile south of the junction on U.S. 101, is the nearest town.

Nearby

• Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway, closed to commercial vehicles, runs ten paved miles through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, signed off U.S. 101 six miles north of Orick.
• Cal-Barrel Road allows leashed dogs on the roadway, an unpaved mile and a half off the Drury Parkway. It closes to vehicles for the winter season, and motorhomes, RVs, and trailers are prohibited.
• Davison Road runs seven mostly unpaved miles to the Fern Canyon Trailhead from a junction 2.5 miles north of Orick, with motorhomes capped at 24 feet and trailers prohibited. A Fern Canyon parking permit is required May 1 through September 30 and must be reserved in advance.
• Coastal Drive Loop, about nine miles round trip near Klamath and mostly paved, has a one-way northbound section unsuited to RVs or trailers.

Full destination guide: Redwood National and State Parks.