Humboldt County comprises the Eureka–Arcata–Fortuna, CA Micropolitan Statistical Area. It is located on the far North Coast ~270 miles north of San Francisco.

Its primary population centers of Eureka, the site of College of the Redwoods main campus, and the smaller college town of Arcata, site of Humboldt State University, are located adjacent to Humboldt Bay, California’s second largest natural bay. Area cities and towns are known for hundreds of ornate examples of Victorian architecture.

Humboldt County is a densely forested mountainous and rural county with about 110 miles of coastline (more than any other county in the state), situated along the Pacific coast in Northern California’s rugged Coast (Mountain) Ranges. With nearly 1,500,000 acres of combined public and private forest in production, Humboldt County alone produces twenty percent of total volume and thirty percent of the total value of all forest products produced in California. The county contains over forty percent of all remaining old growth Coast Redwood forests, the vast majority of which is protected or strictly conserved within dozens of national, state, and local forests and parks, totaling approximately 680,000 acres (over 1,000 square miles).