The Bricklink Designer Program has become a haven for fan favorite themes like Classic Castle, Western, Pirates, and Trains. BLDB Series 6, which goes on sale today, hits some of those greatest hits, but the set that caught my eye isn’t tied to LEGO nostalgia, but childhood memories of summer vacation and visiting National Parks. Sequoia Tree Trail, created by 28-year-old Canadian builder Daniel Smith (pieceonearth), is a love letter to parks, rangers, and the largest trees on Earth – the Giant Sequoias. Sequoia Tree Trail contains 3,187 pieces and sells for $269.99. Pre-orders for this set and the rest of BDP Series 6 run through October 13th, 2025 at 12 PM Pacific time.
The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
The Build
The Bricklink Designer Program turns fan submissions into sets, but unlike the LEGO Ideas program, BDP doesn’t hand off the concept to LEGO designers to reimagine. The set is released exactly as the fan designer intended. In my experience, there’s an aesthetic difference in building a BDP set. More brick stacking, more heft, but also a greater degree of detail from all angles. It’s much closer than building a MOC, as effectively, it is the MOC of a very talented builder.
Sequoia Tree Trail is unusual for a set of this size – 3,187 pieces – as it is focused mostly on terrain and landscaping. The first 8 bags focus on building out the lovely asymmetrical base and initial groundcover. A fairly dense sandwich of bricks between plates, it’s quite sturdy.
Five bags go towards the visitor’s center, a stand alone build that can be lifted from the base. The roof can be removed and the back wall swings open so that you can explore the cozy interior. It’s a fun little build with a simple shape but some fun details like the asymmetrical roof. A few map variations and logs use printed tiles, with the rest of the graphics being stickers. This is a limitation of the BDP sets, which must use in-production parts and can’t utilize new molds, colors, or prints.
After a few more bags of landscaping, minifigures, and props, the final 11 bags go towards the two enormous sequoia trees. The trees are stand alone builds with a hole in the trunk that slots onto a peg on the base. The sequoias are built around a SNOT core. No technic is involved. The trees’ bark is mostly created by plate 1×4 Outside Bow in dark orange, and the results are very effective.
The set involves a lot of repetition, especially the sequoias, and the landscaping requires patience and going slow to match the exact stud placement. I found it relaxing but I can see how some might find it a bit boring. After a marathon build of the Death Star last month, I took my time and built Sequoia Tree Trail a few bags a day over a week and a half and was glad I did so.
The Minifigs
The set includes 9 standard minifigs, a baby, a dog, and loads of other critters. We have three park rangers, a family of four, a hiking couple, and a woman with her dog. Standard for BDP sets, none of the figures are unique, but it’s a thoughtful mix that cover all the stories one might imagine in the setting.
The Finished Model
Sequoia Tree Trail is a beautiful model with a unique silhouette. It succeeds by letting the enormous redwoods star. Typically when LEGO mixes nature and architecture, nature is a garnish, but here it is the main course. The two trees are dwarf the ranger station and minifigs.
The set holds up in the details as well. The terrain is dense with ferns, leaves, rocks, and critters but it doesn’t look messy. One of my favorite details is the way vines curl around the larger sequoia’s trunk.
Most of the building techniques are pretty straight forward, but I did appreciate the unique fence design.
The Visitor Center looks great nestled among the trees, but it’s the weakest part of the build in several ways. First, the interior is far too cramped to be useable. I appreciated the stickers showcasing the various animals in the scene (using actual bananas for the iconic banana slug is perfect!) but I wish it was slightly larger so accommodate a ranger and guest with elbow room. Also, the roof and chimney are a bit fussy when removing or placing the building. The roof design, supported by pylons on the base, looks good when set up, but doesn’t hold up as well as, say, the roof of a modular.
Taken as a whole, Sequoia Tree Trail can best be described as immersive. Trails weave around landmarks that keep the set interesting from every angle. Wildife and clusters of foliage reward a closer look. It’s a trip to the forest perfectly scaled for your minifigures.
Conclusions and Recommendations
LEGO has released a fair number of ranger themed sets under the City line for young builders, but never at a scale like Sequoia Tree Trail. As someone with many memories of camping trips among the redwoods, this set takes me back. It’s a celebration of nature but also the curation of parks as places to connect visitors with wilderness.
The build process is extensive, but not complex. It feels closer to painting by numbers than engineering. I was rarely surprised or delighted in how things were constructed, but I did come away with a greater appreciation for landscaping on large-scale MOCs.
One of the most common refrains among old-school AFOLs is that LEGO neglects the themes that made us love the brick to begin. The Bricklink Designer Program answers that demand with incredible fan designs that expand on nostalgic themes with an AFOL’s eye for detail and complexity. Sequoia Tree Trail is for the grown-up kid who wishes those little trees that accompanied a childhood playset could be as big as their real world counterparts. It’s the great outdoors designed for minifigs to get lost in. If you enjoy nature as much as I do, it’s a set you won’t want to miss.
LEGO Bricklink Designer Program Series 6 – Sequoia Tree Trail consists of 3,187 parts and is avialable to pre-order through October 13th, 2025 at 12 PM Pacific time, with models shipping roughly 6 months later.