Forest from Another Time

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I woke up this morning in a roadside campground in Humboldt State Park south of Scotia.

This park in the Eel River Valley is the largest of the redwood parks created by the Save the Redwoods League.

The campground illustrates what motivated people to fight so hard against Maxxam.

It is located in a second growth redwood grove.

The trees are visibly smaller than the old growth forest I saw yesterday.

Even worse, like Lynn Canyon near Vancouver (see Ancient Artworks), the huge stumps of the original trees appear all over.

Unlike eastern forest second growth (see The Majesty of Trees) the contrast between this environment and what came before is quite obvious.

If Maxxam had had their way, the entire valley would have looked like this.





This campground also shows a consequence of California’s brutal budget battle this year.

At least half of the facilities were closed, because the park has no funds to maintain them.

Rather inconvenient to say the least.

Avenue of the Giants

I need breakfast and have errands to run, so I first got to see one of the park’s signature sights, the Avenue of the Giants.

This road ranks as one of the most scenic in California, because it passes directly through groves of old growth redwood trees.

Trees so tall their tops vanish in the sky line the road so closely that people could almost touch them as they pass.

The road passes more trees than Howland Hill Road.

The pavement falls in perpetual shadow.





This road also starkly illustrates why I wanted a convertible for this road trip, because the best scenery is straight overhead!

That creates a rather large problem, since looking at the road is far more important.

Thankfully, I was used to this type of drive by this point from the Olympics, looking mostly at the road and occasionally up at the trees.

I also pulled over many times to take endless photographs, even though they can’t really do these trees justice.





Finally, I arrived in Myers Flat.

Towns in the Eel River Valley tend to small, but this one was small even by those standards.

The entire town consists of seven buildings, one of which is a general store and another the post office.

Beyond are hills covered in more redwoods.

Shrine Drive Thru Tree

Since I’m in Myers Flat anyway, I went to the town’s signature site of redwood kitsch, the Shrine Drive Thru Tree.

As noted yesterday, mature redwood trees have fire proof bark.

When a tree burns, it leaves a hollow opening at the base, with the tree still alive.

The Drive Through Tree is an ancient redwood which was struck by lightning.

It burned enough of the tree to create an opening just large enough to drive a car through.

After the roadway was built in 1923, an early promoter noticed the tree, built a dirt track, and started charging admission.

Other drive through redwoods exist, but they were created with chainsaws.





The trip through the tree is just as surreal as it sounds.

For starters, the tree has rotted from the inside out, so it is now completely hollow.

Only a layer of wood under the bark keeps it alive.

More importantly, the tree is unstable enough that a strong wind would knock it over.

A network of cables keeps it up.

Lastly, the hole in the tree is just as tight as the tunnel at Needle’s Eye in the Black Hills (see Sacred Peaks), if not more so.

Of course, a car in the hole is also an unmissable photo opportunity.





The property has a few other things to see beyond the drive through tree.

The most notable are two tree houses carved from single redwood logs.

They are large enough to climb inside, although a rather tight fit.

Some of the details (shutters, bookshelves with books, etc.) are pretty impressive.

Also worth seeing is a “redwood cathedral” formed when three trees grew right next to each other forming a wall, which reminded me of a tiny version of the Grove of the Patriarchs near Mount Rainier (see The Great Mountain).





After the Drive Thru Tree, I have a choice to make.

I have sufficient time to either see more redwood groves in Humboldt, some of the most impressive in California, or visit the valleys north of San Francisco.

I like trees far more than wine, so I took the groves.

This is not the choice made by most visitors to northern California, but it fits my interests.

Founders Grove

Of the groves in Humboldt State Park, the Founders Grove is the easiest to reach.

It was one of the first acquired by the Save the Redwoods League, in 1921, and is named for their founders.

From the parking lot, a short trail leads to the Founders Tree, one of the tallest and oldest redwood trees in existence.

Its true size only becomes apparent near it, because the surrounding trees are also huge.





The forest around the tree perfectly illustrates the redwood life cycle.

Like old growth forests elsewhere, it is filled with trees of all sizes, all of them redwoods.

Several fallen logs lie on the floor.

This downfall, which would otherwise be logged, is the true marker of an undisturbed redwood forest.

Old trees mostly die due to being blown over or burned.

This opens a hole in the canopy young trees need to grow.

Thanks to its resin, old growth redwood wood rots very slowly.

Finally, the forest contains no understory at all except for ferns, since the redwoods block out most light.





From the Founders Tree, the trail goes through the grove.

It features an endless parade of unbelievably tall trees surrounded by ferns.

Unlike some groves, sunlight does filter through in many places.

Some people find redwood hikes unsettling due to the lack of plant diversity, but I had the opposite reaction.

I was in the presence of something truly majestic, tall old trees like nothing else on earth.

The view was ever changing and always amazing.





The hike passes a few notable trees.

Several had the same sort of fire damage as the Drive Thru Tree, although not to that extent.

These hollows got the name ‘goosepens’, from early farmers who used them to hold geese and other birds!

One had a crack wide enough to walk through.

Eventually, the trail reaches the Dyerville Giant.

It was the tallest tree in the world when it blew over in 1991.

Now it is an enormous log that dramatically shows how big a tree can get.

It is wider than a human is tall, and so long it disappears from view.

Cracks in the wood are covered in ferns and moss.

After that tree, the trail passes other fallen trees, including a few that fell on other trees creating a tangle of logs.

Rockefeller Grove

Despite its majesty, the hike in Founders Grove can’t compare to an experience available elsewhere in the park.

In the late 1920s, the League set its sights on a huge grove of redwoods in what was then an isolated part of the Eel Valley.

They chose it due to its size, and because it was filled with old growth trees at a density unusual even for this valley.

Pacific Lumber asked for a rather large sum to give it up (and this was pre-takeover).

John Rockefeller Jr., the same philanthropist who was instrumental in preserving Jackson Hole (see Those peaks) agreed to donate half the funds, provided the state of California supplied the other half.

They did, and Rockefeller Grove, the largest intact grove of old growth redwoods in existence, became part of Humboldt State Park in 1931.

It provides a hike like none other.





Just getting there provides some adventure.

A narrow and pothole filled road branches off from the Avenue of the Giants and follows the opposite bank of the Eel River.

The road is filled with tight curves that must be taken slowly.

Eventually, the road turns away from the river and a steep, unmarked dirt track drops down to the river bank.

This ends at the trailhead.

I suspect many regular visitors like the road condition, because it means only dedicated hikers ever see this place.

Unlike Founders Grove, I had it to myself.





John Steinbeck in Travels with Charlie called redwood trees “ambassadors from another time”.

As noted yesterday, the species evolved during the Cretaceous Period, making them one of the oldest land plants.

In a small grove like Founders Grove, the trees felt like a spectacle from the past existing in the present.

In Rockefeller Grove, the feeling is the exact reverse.

This grove contains so many trees, so close to each other, that the grove felt like the normal environment, and I was an intruder among them.





In this forest, I was an ant.

Tall redwoods reach for the heavens all around.

Everywhere I turned, the trees reached to the limit of vision.

In most places, they were so dense, they blocked the sunlight.

These trees make the Grove of the Patriarchs hike seem puny by comparison.

Like Founder’s Grove, the only understory is ferns and moss.

The trees block the breeze as well, so the grove is almost completely silent.

I grew up hiking in eastern forests; here I felt the overwhelming majesty of the natural world.

I imagine the hobbits in Lord of the Rings felt like this when they first encountered Fangorn Forest.





The sense of hiking in a forest from another age reaches its apex around halfway through the hike.

A side path goes to a bridge over a stream, Bull Creek.

The stream banks are covered in redwood trees.

Some of them, sadly, date to just after a catastrophic (and human caused) flood in the 1950s.

Since the trees block the breeze, the trees are reflected perfectly in the water.

Here, I realized I was looking at a vista just like the one dinosaurs saw, over seventy five million years ago.

How many other living things can provide an experience like this?

The Coast Range

After the redwoods, I have a long drive south to San Francisco.

The first part goes through the Coast Range.

This area is notorious for mudslides.

A close look at the landscape shows the reason, steep slopes covered in nothing but grass and bushes.

Any heavy rainstorm saturates the soil, and down it goes.





The road has warnings, of course, but these have appeared elsewhere.

I realized this stretch is different when I saw several hillsides shaped like ziggurats, the same terraces seen outside the Homestake Open Cut. (see Gold Fever)

State highway engineers built these over the sites of old slides in an attempt to prevent new ones.

A few of them are surrounded by high powered lights, the better for drivers to see the hazards.

I suppose it was inevitable that I then encountered something much nastier, a stretch where the road shrunk to half its width between a long set of concrete barriers next to a cliff.

On the other side of those barriers was a huge pile of dirt and rocks and earth moving equipment.

This slide had to be less than a month old.

Despite the beauty, I was glad when this part of the drive was over.





The road eventually drops into a wide river valley surrounded by rolling hills of golden grass.

This is the Russian River Valley, the northernmost of California’s wine growing regions.

From there, the famous names come fast: Napa, Sonoma, Calistoga, Santa Rosa, and finally Marin and San Rafael.

I felt a bit of a thrill; San Francisco, a city that looms large for technologists, is getting ever closer.

The road passes an exit for Lucas Valley.

George Lucas does live there, although it got the name long before he arrived.

My guidebook warned that the valley has nothing worth seeing (except maybe George Lucas’s entrance gate) so I passed it by.





Not long afterward, I first encountered something that will be a huge nemesis over the next few days.

My guidebook warned that San Francisco in summer is one of the foggiest cities in the world.

The entire surrounding area can have perfect weather, and San Francisco will still be stuck in fog.

I’ve been in fog before, but the scale this time is nearly incomprehensible.

It started as little wisps, became thick and clammy, and finally turned into pea soup.

A perfectly clear drive a half hour ago is now a nasty mess.





The fog ruined what I had anticipated being one of the grand sights of this trip.

When driving to San Francisco from the north, knowledgeable visitors know to pull off the highway at an exit marked for ‘Point Bonita’.

Immediately afterward is a parking lot with what should be a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

One of the most impressive engineering landmarks in the world, its ziggurat towers with Art Deco styling designed by Irving Morrow have become icons.

What I saw instead was a vague reddish blob through thick fog.

In fact, the only way I knew I was at the Golden Gate Bridge was by looking straight up while slowly driving over it.

Arrgh!

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Photos

Avenue of the Giants
The Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Second growth redwoods
Second growth redwoods surround the stumps of their ancestors in a Humboldt State Park campground

Shrine Drive Thru Tree
A tree with a road through it!

Car in a tree
This tree is just as surreal as it sounds

Redwood log tree houses
These tree houses are carved from single redwood logs

Founders Grove
Founders grove in Humboldt Redwood State Park

Founders Tree
The Founders Tree, one of the ten tallest in the world

Dyerville Giant
The Dyerville Giant, once the tallest tree in the world

Rockefeller Grove
Rockefeller Grove in Humboldt State Park, the largest group of old growth redwoods in existence.

Bull Creek
Bull Creek surrounded by undisturbed redwood forest

Forest from Another Time
Another look at the incredible density of redwood trees in Rockefeller Grove, Humboldt Redwood State Forest

My View of the Golden Gate Bridge
What I got to see at the Golden Gate Bridge, thanks to San Francisco's thick fog