Tuesday Trip from Humboldt to Jedediah Smith Redwoods

  Leaving Humboldt park, on the Mattole "Road" - here's a few with views of the fog blanket lying low in a valley.  The fog is the life blood of the Redwoods... it is what allows them to grow so tall.  Engineering trivia for you engineers out there - how do you get water from the roots to the top of a tree some 365 ft high?  Pressure at the base is now 150 psi, hard push, even for ma nature, eh?  So the tops are dampened and receive their water via condensation from fogs... what a great idea.... and that's how the tops of the trees get their water...

                     The only bridge in the big burg of Honeydew, Calif, population 47.   Dynomite....

 The road takes you down to almost sea level for a while - this place is so far from anywhere, I mean, it's literally hours to even a convenience (hahaha) store, that the beach is abandoned, they graze cows right to the water.....   Imagine, Calif beaches, acres of homesites available, not a single taker.....  the winds howled while we stopped and walked about.. it was cold.  This is a view of the "Lost Coast"  the engineers stopped the Pacific Coast highway south of this due to the insanity of the terrain (consider that comment in light of the previous posting of the pacific coast highway), they took the road (hahaha) inland around it...  and the area called the Kings Range.  Great hiking, but we were not up for that type of hikes at this point.

 Take a look at 'dat lonely road ahead, we be goin' for a climb, yessiree....

  The fool at the helm, would you trust this guy to get you there?

 That lonely road - those are switchbacks you see up there, back and forth, through that stand of pines up there and then still on afterwards.  Not shown:  potholes that belong in Detroit, I mean, one of the nastiest roads I've ever driven, we were shaken, not stirred, for some 4 hours on this leg of the trip, average speed just a bit under 25 mph...   An unpleasant enduro...  Smooth and twisty, ala PCW, are fun, you just get vertigo and nausea after an hour or so and have to get out to get your land legs back.  Add potholes?  No fun anymore, and the sign some wag put up, "your tax dollars at work", deserved all the bullet holes that were in it.... and trust us while we did not take photos of it (at that point we just wanted the drive over)... 

This is NOT a warm and friendly California beach, no surfin dudes, maybe the seals wear thongs, but surely no one else does.....

Arrived at Crescent City around 4 pm ...(this city has more addicts and drug users than the north shore of Kauai.... so that is saying something.....)and found a Starbucks to access internet.  Got the tent set up at J. Smith Redwoods SP...  it was NOT worth the 10 rating on Moon's guide.. we were spoiled by Humboldt and Ablee tent site.

Time to say good bye to the Redwoods on to Craters...  there is one in Oregon... Crater Lake.  We're up on the Redwood business now, need to learn the crater business....

More Driving.

Sunday at Humboldt Redwoods Ca;.

 V. rare picture, Mr Grumpy with smile, probably gas, just like when he was a kid....

 Scaling the heights?  Actually, the notches I'm standing in are cut for scaffolding the hands set up to stand on while they manned the saws.  See this on most of the old, large stumps..l

 How can any Lionel man pass up a classic truss RR bridge?  This one over the Eel river, abandoned, we think, in the 90's.   The placque on the right says " American Bridge Co, New York, 1910".  Has barriers both ends to keep vehicles off, pedestrians, I suppose, OK.  Flashbacks to movie "Stand By Me" come to mind, but no train coming today.. Bridge has a story, stay tuned...

 Typical Belushi scowl, this actually means he's happy.....honest, that's a happy face....I mean, really, I know the guy..... it was like being around a kid...  he was literally running on the tracks and lovin every minute of it...  (yes he is 70 plus...) we turned our jackets inside out so that if we got busted and some do gooder called the Po Lice we could be "disguised"...  it was great fun...  just don't look down to the dry stream bed some 40 feet below or miss your footing and step on a rotted tie...  what an adventure...  Glad we don't have to set the "example" for the kids anymore... they now know better than to act this way........lol

 Jeepers, painted spans in the back, rusty in the foreground, what's up?....  And hey, look at that riverbed - is there a drought in California?  I think that river used to be just a bit wider....

 Well, mega-flood at xmas, 1964, 28 people died here.  The two spans on the far side were completely submerged, and went under the pressure of being rammed by redwood logs and misc debris, buildings surely.  I'm standing on a piece of the old bridge, rammed into the riverbed, who knows where the rest wound up?   So, two old spans, 1910, two new spans, 1965..  At least two towns nearby, Dyerville and Pepperwood, were totally destroyed to the last building, never to be rebuilt.  There is an overlook for cars to view this bridge, a nearby display shows that you are standing on the debris burial site of the town of Dyerville, the aerial photo illustrates you are literally standing on the town, a not-nice feeling...

 See, trust me now?   Two new ones on the right....  I like the old ones better, had manually adjusted turnbuckles (!) on each span, rosie the riveter had job security...  And yeah, the photographer is standing in the riverbed for this shot, river now just a drainage ditch trickle.  Flood level?   The locals say the TOPS of the truss spans were submerged with debris jamming up against them....

 The landing on the "old" side, old-school technology being overrun by the cold-climate jungle...

 This is NOT the tallest or biggest, just one with a bragging sign.  In the Big M in Alex Bay, they like to tag some thick cuts with a tag "now that's a steak".  I thought it was clever.   Take a look - "now that's a tree"....

 This is a massive tree cluster in the Rockefeller Loop trail in the Humboldt Park groves - it's several trees with a natural tunnel through, those are "new" shoots coming up.  Picture does not even begin to illustrate the massive stuff overhead....

 Here I am at base of some nondescript big fella, so many of them as to be sort of numbing - note the burls on the tree, they are being stolen by locals for conversion to cash, they cut them off and then sell them to specialty shops.  The redwood forest existing today is now just 4% of what was there at the time of the settlers, 96% lost, a lot of it forever.   In typical land management brilliance, the clear-cut lands were spun as being great "for pasture", and so cows keep anything from regrowing until all the root structure is gone and chances for regrowth are over.  Lots of that, everywhere.

 Redwood burl, lots of those...

 Look close at the top half of this burned-out guy - how's that for a widowmaker ready to fall?  We found deeply-driven branches frequently, when they fall from height, they drive deeply into the ground.    Every old one we saw had been through many, many fires, they largely survive the fires, even begin to regrow bark and skin-over the damaged areas and self-heal...  Wow...

 How long are these trees?  Look real hard way, way back - that's one of us standing at the end of this downed trunk, and it's NOT the top - when they fall the top 50' or so usually flies off from the velocity of the strike...

Same tree, this was a big fella...   Hard to put into words the visual impact of these trees, there is freakin' nothing in the NE, or anywhere in the USA we've ever been, to even come close to the size of these.   And today's survivors, just 4% of the total, surely do not represent the biggest, those were cut long ago...   or a few left for dummies like us to drive dwarfmobile cars through....

Sun Dirve on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading north to Humboldt

  A typical view from the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) of the northern Ca. coast.   An incredible highway, we drove it to it's bitter end, the number of switchbacks and hairpin turns is too many to recall, but after a few hours of this, vertigo is the usual result, and we leave the car for a bit to give our heads and stomachs a break....  Ditto the next two, below - not a nice coast to run aground on..

 The little Miata that could rests alongside the PCH, two large bags strapped to a luggage rack over a truck packed totally full.   A bloody dwarfmobile by any reasonable standard, this is an unusual choice for touring.   Why have a van with lots of room when you can go jammin',  I mean, like being jammed in to this thing....

   So take a good look at where that highway is with respect to the edge.  Note no guardrails, there are just a very few sections of rail anywhere on the route, this section is clearly so safe that none is called for.  Sure...   And from time to time sections of it fall away, too bad, that....just fix and patch up, backfill, you're good to go....

 Remember all those hokey pix you saw years ago of vintage cars doing the "through the tree" thing?  Well, most of those cars are in the scrapper now, but the trees still live on.  Here we go, how tacky is this?   $5 for the bloody picture, highway robbery....

 To give you a sense of perspective, here's Louise in the root structure of a big fella that fell over.  Do the proportions, make your own guess of the diameter of this thing....

Campsite in Humboldt state park, those are tiny 2nd growth twinky trees there at the sites, the big fellas are just a walk away....

 Like this one - that's me, 5'9", and you can't come close to seeing the top, in excess of 300 ft up..

 Louise next to a big guy blowdown - that's a big tree, yessirree....

 Here is Mr Happy, glumly contemplating this tree, over 340 ft when it was measured in 1957, do you think it's grown since then?....

 Picked up John at the airport on Wed the 23  in San Fransisco, returned during rush hour, over the Golden Gate... John description an unpleasant fools race over bad streets with signage comprehensible only to the locals...  I had fun driving...   I had set up the tent at Sam Taylor State Park.. in the middle of the trees behind the car in the photo above.  Had a great nights sleep.

Drove a little ways to Point Reyes National Seashore.

                                                                
                                                                     John at Point Reyes.

      Lighthouse at Point Reyes... the 350 steps down was easy.. coming back up, well not as much fun.

                                                  Lenses Frensel Lens INTACT!!!!!

              Drakes Beach, we hiked in and spent the night on the shore across the way.

 Sunset from our campsite looking back toward the point were the light house is located. 

 Camped in the dunes, at 2.8 mile hike in..  listed to the waves crash on the beach, saw elk and deer. Had one walk in our camp during breakfast.  Lots of bugs...

 Louise, beginning of the scenic Pacific Coastal Highway.  A scenic route if there ever was one, it's twists and turns are remarkable. If driven fast, one soon begins to experience a sense of vertigo as one switchback after another is navigated as the approach to dealing with the more difficult canyons; the easier ones simply dealt with by exceptionally high bridges.   Sad to say that the Russian River appears to be another drought casualty, it no longer flows into the ocean, dead-ending into a large sandbar barrier a few hundred feet short of the Pacific.

Stayed  Friday night at Russian Gulch SP.. see pic above, the fog rolled in as we had a bottle of wine and watched the light fall.  While we sat on the cold beach a seal came to visit us.  Beautiful creature.

Good night's sleep, but John and I were both sore from out hike into to the Point Reyes Coastal Beach...  in between that and sleeping on the ground and sitting in the car for hours.

Now on to Humboldt State Park to check out the redwoods.  Hope to be a mellow Sat morning drive.