Los Angeles Times

In Northern California, residents brace for a fight over their 'magical' redwood-lined road

FORT DICK, Calif. - Wonder Stump Road passes beneath a canopy of needled redwood boughs that scatter sunbeams and cast an otherworldly green hue.

A drive along the narrow one-lane road is quiet. Tranquil.

But these days, terse hand-painted signs poke out from driveways of homes tucked in the woods.

"We like our trees right where they ARE

LEAVE OUR TREES ALONE!!"

In this sparsely populated, economically depressed northwest corner of California, people don't have the tourist attractions that urbanites brag about. There are no five-star restaurants, no world-famous museums or amusement parks, no nightlife scene.

What people do have to boast about are trees - California's iconic coast redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth. Wonder Stump Road is lined on both sides by them.

In a region transformed by logging over the last century, residents have long worried that someone was going to come along and chop down the so-called tree tunnel of

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