Overview
About Colonial Tree
The tree is estimated at around 1,100 years old. Treat that as an estimate, not an exact count. It’s one of the park’s oldest living landmarks, with a history that stretches well beyond the park’s modern day-use area.
Why stop
- A quick visit to a huge old redwood beside day-use parking.
Map
Where it is
The highest, rockiest slopes around here are a summer buffet for grizzly bears.
Pfeiffer Big Sur Tour Guide
Your drive to Colonial Tree, narrated.
Parkwolf is a GPS audio tour guide for Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. As you drive, it chimes in with what’s ahead: hidden gems, upcoming stops, history, geology, and wildlife, right through your car’s speakers.
Recorded for this place
Colonial Tree and the Riverside Picnic Areas“Colonial Tree is ahead near Day Use Lot Four, an easy stop at the park's biggest redwood. It's estimated to be around eleven hundred years old.”
Plays as you drive up to Colonial Tree in the Parkwolf Pfeiffer Big Sur Tour Guide.
More stories near here in the app
- Big Sur River Gorge: Beyond the Paved Path
- Pfeiffer Big Sur Campground and Camp Store
- Big Sur Station: Gateway to Pine Ridge
- Mount Manuel Trail: A Full Day Above the Gorge
- 10 audio storiesacross Pfeiffer Big Sur’s roads, triggered by GPS as you drive
- Wildlife heatmapsfor California Condor, Wild Turkey, Mule Deer, and 13 more
- Works offlinemaps, 11 trails, 20 places, and audio download before you lose signal
- CarPlay readysimple controls built for the drive
“Fantastic app with many points of information… It’s great to just turn on while you’re driving and it gives you an audio tour of the national Park. We love it!!!!”
Guide
More about Colonial Tree
A quick stop beside Lot 4Colonial Tree is a coast redwood between Day Use Lots 3 and 4, beside Lot 4.
Colonial Tree is a coast redwood between Day Use Lots 3 and 4, beside Lot 4. It’s the park’s biggest and probably oldest redwood, and an easy short stop if you’re already in the day-use area. No hike is needed to reach it.
Look up from the fenceA wooden fence protects the tree.
A wooden fence protects the tree. Its low branches can make the full redwood shape hard to read when you’re close, so step back outside the fence and look from the broad base up into the canopy. For a photo, include the base and some of the branches overhead; that shows the tree’s scale better than a tight trunk shot.
In Big Sur’s redwood habitatCoast redwoods grow near the southern end of their natural range here, in creek drainages and…
Coast redwoods grow near the southern end of their natural range here, in creek drainages and along the Big Sur River. In the park, ferns and redwood sorrel spread across the shaded ground beneath them.
Wildlife
Wildlife in Pfeiffer Big Sur
10 sightingsCalifornia CondorMost seen around 1 PMSighting map
55 sightingsWild TurkeyMost seen around 7 AMSighting map
101 sightingsMule DeerMost seen around 6 PMSighting map
36 sightingsTurkey VultureMost seen around 1 PMSighting map
46 sightingsAcorn WoodpeckerMost seen around 9 AMSighting map
11 sightingsGray FoxMost seen around 6 PMSighting mapSighting maps show where each species has been reported across Pfeiffer Big Sur. Wildlife moves, so no sighting is guaranteed.
