How to Get to Redwood National Park by Bus, Train, or Car

Redwood National and State Parks protect about 130,000 acres of the far north California coast, including trees that were seedlings when Rome was an empire. Almost every guide to getting there answers with a road trip.

You don’t need a car. You can ride the whole way: Amtrak to a Bay Area railhead, a connecting coach up Highway 101, and a $5 public bus that stops inside the park.

The short version

Three towns put you next to the parks: Arcata, Eureka and Crescent City. Arcata and Eureka are the ones you can actually reach from California. Crescent City, despite being the closest to the northern groves, only had bookable service from Oregon when we checked.

Nothing runs direct from San Francisco, Sacramento or Los Angeles. Every one of those trips is a train to a Bay Area railhead and then an Amtrak Thruway coach, sold together as one ticket. If you’d rather not think about the connection, our guide to how transfers actually work covers what happens if the first leg runs late.

If you are starting anywhere along the coach’s own route, it is simpler and cheaper. It starts at Martinez and picks up at Vallejo, Petaluma, Santa Rosa and Ukiah, and from any of those you ride straight through with no change at all.

Does Amtrak go to Redwood National Park?

This is the question people ask most, and the honest answer has two halves. No passenger train reaches Redwood National Park. There’s no track up that part of the coast and there hasn’t been for a long time. Any map showing you a rail line into Humboldt or Del Norte is showing you something that doesn’t exist.

What does exist is the Amtrak Thruway coach: a scheduled bus, sold as part of an Amtrak ticket, running from Martinez up Highway 101 to Eureka and Arcata. That is why searching for a train to Eureka returns results. You really can buy one Amtrak ticket from San Francisco or Sacramento and ride to the coast. You’ll just spend the last several hours on a coach, and that’s the part worth knowing before you book.

The nearest station with actual trains is Klamath Falls, Oregon, and it’s a poor front door: the connecting coach from there to Crescent City takes about six hours on its own. The same pattern shows up at other parks, which is why our guide to reaching Yosemite spends as much time on connections as on trains.

The last few miles: the $5 bus into the park

Getting to Arcata or Eureka is most of the problem. The rest is a local bus that almost nothing written about this park mentions. Redwood Coast Transit Route 20 runs along Highway 101 between Smith River and Eureka, and it stops at the Thomas H. Kuchel Visitor Center and at Prairie Creek, both inside the parks.

The fare is $5 from Crescent City, Arcata or Eureka, and $3 from Klamath. That’s the whole trick. A ticket to Eureka and five more dollars gets you to a park visitor center. Not every trip calls at the stops inside the parks, so read the timetable column by column rather than assuming.

One caveat, and it is a real one. Route 20 runs on weekdays, and the timetable has carried Saturdays too, though weekend service has been under review. Check which days are running before you count on one, and look at the return trip before you commit to the outbound.

What you can reach without a car

There’s no entrance station and no fee to enter the national park, and walking or cycling into the state parks costs nothing either. The day-use charge you may have read about applies to vehicles, so arriving without one quietly saves you money. The park service fee page has the current detail.

Tall Trees Grove needs a free reservation and is open year round, issued by the Redwood Parks Conservancy rather than the usual federal booking site, so look in the right place. Its trailhead is not on the Route 20 stop list, so work out how you would reach it before you book one. Fern Canyon has a permit system between mid-May and mid-September, but read it carefully before you assume it applies to you: it admits a vehicle down Davison Road. Arrive on foot or by bike and you can walk in without one. The permits page has both.

Skip Hyperion. The tallest tree is off limits, the route to it was never a trail, and the park service enforces the closure. There is far better walking at Stout Grove and along the Prairie Creek trails, and you won’t be looking over your shoulder.

New since 2026: 'O Rew Redwoods Gateway opened to the public in August, on land returned to the Yurok Tribe and operated by them, at the base of Bald Hills Road in Orick. It’s the newest thing on this coast by some distance. Orick itself is not a timetabled stop, so work out the approach from the Kuchel Visitor Center before you count on reaching it by bus.

Bringing a bike widens what a bus trip can reach considerably, and the parks have miles of road and trail open to them. Our guide to taking a bike on board covers how the racks and reservations work. Before you go, check the current conditions page: trails here close for fallen trees more often than you would expect, and several seasonal footbridges are pulled out for winter.

If you are choosing between parks rather than planning this one, the ones that photograph best are not always the ones that are easiest to reach. Our roundup of the most photogenic parks in the country is a decent place to start an argument.

If you drive or fly in

Driving is what most people do, and the distances are the real constraint. Eureka is a bit over 270 miles from San Francisco and more than 400 from Portland. The road is slow and beautiful in its northern stretch. Give it more time than a mapping app suggests.

For airports, the closest to the southern end is California Redwood Coast Humboldt County Airport (ACV), just north of Arcata. Del Norte County Airport (CEC) at Crescent City is closest to the northern end. Both are small. Medford, Oregon (MFR) is larger, a bit over two hours by road from Crescent City and around three and a half from the park itself. Whichever you pick, you’ll still need the bus or a car for the last stretch, which is the same problem this whole page is about.

Frequently asked questions

The “from” prices on this page refresh from Wanderu’s route data: each is the cheapest fare recently available on that route, the same figure its route page shows. What you pay depends on when you book. “Typical” fares are the median of Wanderu bookings into these gateway towns, September 2025 to September 2026, per person, the full price paid. This is a thin corridor, about 235 bookings across the whole year, so we quote a typical fare only where a route carried at least ten. Redwood Coast Transit fares are that agency’s published prices as of September 2026, and Wanderu doesn’t sell them.