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Published: September 12th 2008
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After leaving Yosemite, we decided to head back towards the coast of California to the area known as the Redwood Coast. This is home to some of the last remaining forests of the huge Redwood trees, and as it was pretty stunning walking through the Giant Sequoias in Yosemite, we thought we'd pay them a visit.
It was a pretty long drive to get there in one day, so we stopped at a town called Redding for the night and the next day we continued our journey, but as we got out of Redding, we noticed an electronic board saying the highway we were going to take was closed due to a forest fire! Now, we had been navigating our way around America so far by using Google Maps, and then taking pictures of them on our digital camera so we could use them in the car... all works really well when you have Internet access! Anyway, we found a map in one of the many brochures we had picked up and found an alternative route. It looked like a main road on the map, but soon we were winding our way through deep forests and up the sides of
steep mountains, until eventually the road narrows to a single lane, so then we had to battle the oncoming traffic to! The smoke was pretty bad at the start, like a blanket of cloud covering the sky. It was a stunning detour but it must have been a pretty big fire, as we were under the cover of the smoke for miles and miles.
Eventually, we made our way to the coast, it was a lot different from the typical Californian beach scene we had found further south, now the coast was dominated by these giant trees. Due to the diversion we had taken we were close to the Avenue of the Giants, a section of road which ran parallel to the main highway, where there was a self-drive tour running through the middle of a forest. The huge trees were right up next to the road, making the car and road seem tiny compared to the ancient Redwoods.
We stayed the night on the coast in a town called Eureka, so named because of the Californian Gold Rush, which is located in between a couple of Redwood Forests. We had only been thinking in the last few
days how we'd been travelling around the Pacific Ring of Fire for pretty much the whole of our year trip and not felt any earthquakes. However, on our penultimate night before starting our journey east across America, we were in our room in the evening watching some TV when the whole room jolted. We didn't really know what was going on, the room didn't shake so we did not really think it was an earthquake and by the time we said “what was that?” it was over. The next day we looked on the Internet to find reports that indeed it was an earthquake, 4.6 on the richter scale somewhere off the coast, and it was mainly felt in and around Eureka. It was not at all how we'd imagined an earthquake would feel like... there was no shaking, no pictures falling off the wall, just one big jolt, hard to describe really! But after 10 months of travelling round the Ring of Fire we had actually felt an earthquake, and that was about as much earthquake 'excitement' as we wanted!
We left Eureka the next morning, heading up to the Redwood National Park, a huge area, home to
several of the worlds tallest trees. The tallest tree in the world is located here, deep within the forest and unfortunately inaccessible to the public. The coastal area where the park is located gets the same sea fog that we had in San Francisco. We stopped at Lady Bird Johnson grove to do a trail through the forest, and the fog gave it a very mysterious and eerie feel, like something out of a horror movie as the fog drifted through the trees. There were a couple of trees with burnt out holes in the bottom of the trunk that we could easily fit into, showing just how big they were, especially as the tree was still alive and unaffected by this huge gaping hole! We spent our time wandering in amongst the gigantic tress on some of the trails, feeling incredible small! Some of these trees can live to over 2000 years old, and its really hard to describe the scale of these giant trees, the camera really could not pick up the size as they tower above everything.
After our time in the forests, we stopped in Crescent City for the night, which would be our last
night in California before heading into Oregon and starting our long journey east.
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