Day 179

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Obfuscator writes: We left our motel by about 8:00, which was useful, since we knew we had sort of a tight schedule for the day. The continental breakfast was a bit disappointing, consisting of only toast and some scrawny donuts. Still, I'd recommend the motel, unless continental breakfast is a big deal for you.

We drove down US-101 into the Redwood National Park, which is actually a conglomeration of several state parks bound together by some federal land. There's an awful lot to see in this area, and we sort of ran out of time to actually see all of it. We started though, with a drive along the coast, which afforded us several great opportunities to stop and look out over bluffs, beaches, and cool crags along the Pacific. Of course, both of us have been to the Pacific before, but I think it's been quite a while for us as well.

It didn't take long before we were surrounded by Coastal Redwoods. A different species from the Giant Sequoias, the Coastal Redwoods tend to be taller and narrower. This is not to say that they're narrow. The old ones still get up to 15 feet or so in diameter, which is pretty staggering. I guess there are still a good number of trees in these parks that are over 1000 years old, which can make one feel pretty insignificant in comparison. We stopped at the Big Tree Wayside to see the Big Tree. It's kind of funny how these trees don't really seem all that impressive until you get up really close to them. From a little ways away, or further, they just look like any other tree. When you're right next to them though, you realize just how massive they are.

We learned a bit more about trees in general. For one thing, we now know about burls, which explain many of the weird cancerous looking growths we've seen on trees from time to time. Apparently some trees can basically start an entirely new growth from these things. It's a way for a tree to survive when it has sort of been cut off from sunlight, or been too damaged in its main structure, or what have you. The result is a tree that grows out from another tree. In some cases, this ends up looking positively gravity-defying. Looking around the forest with all its moss and towering trees, Onaxthiel also decided that all the Endor scenes of Return of the Jedi must have been filmed here, despite any possible evidence to the contrary.

We were stopped by an employee of the California State Parks who was conducting some research about Park Visitors. He had a 10 minute survey we helped him with, though I suspect our data was pretty much worthless, since we had just got there a couple hours earlier, and were leaving again in a few more, and had hardly seen any of their park facilities. Inside one of their visitor's centers, we did find some antlers that were stuck through a huge section of tree trunk. Apparently the tree ended up growing around the entire deer skull after it died with its antlers stuck in it. We found out that there were a couple of other neat spots in the area that we wanted to hit, including Fern Canyon and Gold Bluffs, but we had run out of time, and they would have required about 16 miles of gravel road to get to. Instead we turned back north to Oregon, where we were scheduled to meet with one of his army buddies.

We drove North to Ashland, where he lives, and he showed us around the town. It's a cool looking town. It's got a lot of neat shops and restaurants, as well as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and some pretty park spaces. Apparently it also has a lot of outdoorsy things to do in the summer, and skiing and such in the winter. We had a good dinner and some drinks, and crashed for the night at his place.

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