5. Took a drive through the Redwood National Park just south of Crescent City.  When  harvesting of coastal redwoods began in the early 1850s, over two million acres of old-growth redwood forests existed.  It took less than 60 years to reduce this number into hundreds-of-thousands of acres. By the late 1910s, a preservationist group called the Save-the-Redwoods League began purchasing large tracts of redwood acreage in an effort to save the quickly disappearing forests.