In the second in a series of posts about my epic summer vacation, I want to write about one of the most spectacular things I have seen in my life: The Redwoods.
Previous vacation post: Oregon Shakespeare Festival
But I’m going to steal words from John Steinbeck who makes me feel better for not being able to fully describe or photograph my experience:
“The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.”
Traveling from Oregon to San Francisco, we stopped in two separate Redwood areas and had two separate experiences – which for the reasons quoted above I can’t successfully tell you about or show you ha!! – so I will give you some details on our itinerary so you can plan to see them for yourself:
Our first stop was at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. The beautiful Stout Grove hiking trail is hidden away and is only accessible by a narrow dirt road. The grove has a short loop trail (takes about 30 minutes to walk if you are lingering a bit). There is no parking fee or entrance fee for this park. Here is a site I found that explains this particular hike. This area was my first glimpse of these trees, so I will always remember it for that reason.
It was fitting, after our previous visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, that I found Shakespeare quoted on this bench here:
After this hike, we drove on to Fortuna, CA (about 2 1/2 hrs.) as a stopping point before hitting Redwood Stop #2 at Humboldt Redwoods State Park the next morning.
Here we did the Avenue of the Giants Auto Tour, stopping to hike at two separate areas. The Avenue of the Giants is a 31-mile scenic highway through a Redwood forest. Here is a link to this area’s official website. These groves had a different feel as they had a floor of lush greenery and we had more opportunity to notice and walk on the fallen trees, which remain part of the forest and its ecosystem.
The path worn on a fallen Redwood.
Ideally we would have spent a full day here, driving through and stopping to hike at each of the eight stops or even camping overnight, but we had to move on to another amazing spot in California, Point Arena, which I will write about in a few days.