Muir Woods gets the postcards, but it also gets the traffic. Reservations for parking or the shuttle are effectively mandatory, the shuttle alone can swallow 30 to 40 minutes each way, and between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekends the famous hush is hard to find. The good news: California has redwoods across hundreds of miles, and plenty of groves where you can hear actual silence.

Worth knowing first: the state has two giant species. Coast redwoods, the tallest trees on Earth, dominate the fog belt of Northern California, while giant sequoias — the bulkiest trees on the planet — grow in the Sierra Nevada. Both deliver the awe.

Up near the Oregon border, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park holds old-growth trees thousands of years old, with the easy half-mile Stout Memorial Grove loop, plus showier routes like the Boy Scout Tree Trail and Grove of Titans. Further south, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park lays claim to what RedwoodHikes.com rates the state's best redwood hike: the 11.5-mile Miner's Ridge and James Irvine Loop, ending at the green-walled Fern Canyon. Fall is a quiet, underused time to go.

Humboldt Redwoods State Park's Avenue of the Giants is a 31-mile scenic road about 225 miles north of San Francisco, scattered with short loop trails, swimming holes, campgrounds and one of the three living drive-through trees. Because it's so spread out, crowds never really build. In Sonoma County, Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve sits only about 70 miles north of Muir Woods — often quicker to reach once you factor in the shuttle — and has a Depression-era CCC-built amphitheatre that hosts concerts.

For film fans, tiny Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park near the Van Duzen River contains Cheatham Grove, where George Lucas shot scenes for 1983's Return of the Jedi. Montgomery Woods State Natural Reserve, between Ukiah and Mendocino, hides a 1.7-mile loop in a fern-lined canyon that one hiking site calls a redwood Shangri-La.

Short on time? Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park is under 10 miles from downtown Santa Cruz, with a Redwood Grove Loop plus a 3.4-mile Fall Creek trail past mossy lime kiln ruins. In the Oakland Hills, Dr. Aurelia Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park offers second-growth forest and loops of any length — pair it with dinner in Oakland, and visit in autumn when ladybugs swarm the forest floor.

For the sequoia side, Calaveras Big Trees State Park has over 1,000 old-growth giants on two trails — a paved 1.7-mile North Grove loop and a moderate 5-mile South Grove route where the biggest trees were seedlings in the first century. And in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, skip the queue around General Sherman and hike the 4-mile trail to Muir Grove, where the trees form a near-perfect circle around a sky-gazing clearing.

Anyone with a car and a flexible itinerary can build a redwood trip without a single reservation headache — pick one coast region and one Sierra park, go on a weekday or in autumn, and you'll get the cathedral, not the queue.