I don’t have a particular narrative to go with our photos of our time in Redwood National & State Parks. My jaw dropped open the moment I saw my first redwood, and I really didn’t manage to get my mouth closed until we left. (Good thing banana slugs can’t fly.) I was just in a perpetual state of awe the whole time. That doesn’t make a very interesting story, though.
So perhaps in lieu of my normal, wordy post, I’ll just put up a bunch of pictures with some commentary and a few helpful things we learned about visiting this park during the process of visiting this park.
Ladybird Johnson Grove – a good starter grove. Impressive, but just wait until you see what comes next. Find Dustin!Photos cannot convey how tall these things are. Look, I told you this would mostly just be pictures of us staring upward.This is one of my fav photos.They just keep getting bigger…Some days, it’s impossible to know how to dress for the weather, so you just do both. That was inevitable, wasn’t it? (In case yoga isn’t your bag, I’m doing Tree Pose.)Trillium Falls.
Can we take a sec and talk about how Jurassic this place is? (Or maybe Cretaceous. I don’t know. Dinosaur-infested, anyway.) These forests felt primordial, which is not unreasonable, given that redwood trees are essentially fossils. Close relatives of today’s redwoods thrived 160 MILLION years ago which, yes, is when dinosaurs were stomping around. Redwoods are basically dinosaurs that survived.
If I had children, the temptation to tell them that dinosaurs still live here would have been nearly irresistible. However, I did reflect as I walked down the trails, tripping over tree roots and running into rocks, that if dinosaurs DID live here, me and my dropped-jaw would have made an easy snack.
Can you spot the T-rex?Redwood roots are gnarly. They also make it really tricky to hike while staring at tree tops. GNARLY. Basal burls can make the redwoods look like sculptures, at times, and also aid in reproduction. New trunks – clones of the main tree – can sprout from a burl if the tree itself is threatened or stressed. Knotty.Treats are just growing along the trails!! It was full-blown blackberry season while we were there, but there were also currants, raspberries, salmonberries, and thimbleberries. Fern Canyon is one of the more famous hikes in the parks. Normally you would have to walk through water for the mile or so that travels through the canyon itself, but this photo is deceptive. Because it’s been such a dry year, we could have done the whole hike without getting our feet wet. The day was cool, so this was okay, but it’s a shame for the more obvious (environmental) reasons.Never thought of using ferns for wallpaper, did you?
Fern Canyon is less than two miles if you do it alone, but we decided on a six mile loop. A bunch of the redwood pics from above are probably from the loop we did. It was gorgeous.Redwoods aren’t the only plants that grow stupid-tall out here. This is a twice-as-tall-as-Dustin thimbleberry forest. The big loop from Fern Canyon (NOT Fern Gully, say it with me) spits you out on a beach! By the time we arrived at the beach with 1.5 miles yet to go to the trailhead, we’d already hiked seven of the six expected miles. Because that’s how hikes go when I’m along. Let’s just say I wasn’t the most enthusiastic hiker for that last mile. I was here for the trees, not the waves.This is not a black and white photo. The road leading to the Fern Canyon trailhead was a white dirt road, and as a result everything along the road had also turned white from the dust. It looked like someone had sculpted the undergrowth from paper. Here’s what the undergrown usually looks like, and I adore it. Those three-leaf clovers are Redwood Sorrell. The undersides of the leaves are purple, and (like everything else around here) they’re huge: each heart-shaped leaf is about two inches wide. BANANA SLUG!! I think this dude was about five inches long? Banana slugs are super cool, and are mascots and gardeners of the redwoods. As little mobile garbage disposals, they are willing to eat absolutely anything other than redwood seeds, keeping the understory clear and providing excellent compost. Moving on to the Fallen Giants portion of our tour. It’s not common to see really giant redwoods simply downed, because most of the oldest growth trees were removed by loggers rather than nature. By the time the forests were protected as parks, a lot of the old-growth downfall had been cleared out. These monsters are in Stout Grove.
I think this clip was from our first day in the park, in the Ladybird Johnson Grove.I’m impersonating a redwood root. You can hardly tell us apart, right?
On the second night of our visit, we had a reservation (advanced reservations required in this park) for a campsite at Flint Ridge. I’d tired REALLY hard to get a reservation on Gold Bluffs Beach, because I loved the idea of camping on a beach (and they have SHOWERS), but there’s only one available site there for hikers, and due to the dodgy data signal I had the day reservations opened, I missed out. Flint Ridge was my backup plan, and I have to say it was a fortunate one. Gold Bluffs Beach is the one from the picture just above and, as mentioned, it was fine. But… instead of that, we got to be on a ridge, snugged back in the trees, overlooking a beach, and it was superb.
Site #4 in the Flint Ridge “backcountry” camping area. I use quotation marks because it was a .25-mile hike to get here. We made at least three trips to the car and lived like kings. This was the only campsite from our entire 40-day trip when we were able to have a fire. Despite the fact that the rest of California was already burning, Redwood is a safe place because the fog comes in and basically drenches everything in the mornings. It’s a little hard to tell here, but the blue you see through the trees is the ocean. We could hear the waves crashing.
The above photo also depicts the creation of the ab-ramen-ation we had for dinner. We meant to cook up something more elaborate, given the proximity of the car and its cooler full of ice, but we never did manage to find a grocery store, so we made do. Two packets of ramen noodles, six packets of dried ramen vegetables, three mix’n’match packets of ramen seasoning, and an extra sprinkling of sesame seeds for good measure. It was SPICY. At least there was beer.
There’s the ocean!Oh yes. We were prepared for s’mores.
On the way out of the park, thanks to a tip from a friend, we pulled off at the botanical trailhead near Gasquet to ogle the darlingtonia californica, aka Cobra Lilies: carniverous pitcher plants. THEY ARE SO COOL.
We could only admire from afar, as they are a protected species. Fortunately, Dustin has a really good camera.
And thusly does this non-story full of pretty pictures come to an end. Hopefully I’ll be back sooner this time with some sort of tale to tell. I think Crater Lake is next? Stay tuned!
Thither & Yon 