We drove about 15 minutes north of Crescent City to Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park. Our goal was to get a close look at the California redwood trees, so we decided to take a short walk through the woods on a one-mile trail. The redwood forests were so much different than any of the topography we had experienced so far on this trip. We all got a good feel for just how tall they are by standing amongst the trees.
I tried to include at least one member of our family in many of these photos in an attempt to try and give perspective to the size and height of the redwood trees. Scott and John are in the photo above.
One thing I really enjoyed about each of our different walks through the forest was that the view was different in each direction that you looked.
I expected that the redwoods would be significantly tall, but one thing that surprised me was the wide circumference of the trees' trunks. Look how wide the trunk is compared to Scott and me in the photo above. My reluctant posers are pictured next to the roots of a fallen tree (to the left of Amelia) below.
The California Redwood National and State Park system includes four different parks, each with slightly different features. While I am not an expert on the redwoods, I felt like our walk through Jedediah State Park provided us with a good example of a "classic" redwoods and the surrounding forest area. Since we needed to drive a few hours south to our next overnight stop, we decided to try one of the other parks along the way.
Bur first, we had to stop at the Tour Thru Tree. The previous evening when we were at the brewery in Crescent City, a friendly gentleman who was sitting at the bar told Scott that he should drive his car through a redwood tree. Who knew this was possible?
Cheesy as this is, this stop made me laugh so hard. Scott and Amelia stayed in the car while John and I got out to take pictures. I think what made me laugh so hard was the concentrated and extremely serious look on Scott's face as he drove the car through the tree. Two minutes earlier he had been laughing about how silly it was that we stopped at this obvious tourist trap, and the next minute he looked like he was taking the most intense test of his life. After he was through, when we asked Scott why he looked so serious he informed us that the space was actually very tight inside and he was worried the whole time about scratching our rental car. Scott is the only member of our household who can say he drove a car through a tree. This was a fun 15 minute detour on our drive to the next state park.
Next, we headed to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, which was somewhat different than Jedediah State Park. We stopped at the visitor's center first to get some information about the park, and then we explored the forest behind the center.
We had fun watching the large herd of Roosevelt elk that was grazing in the grass outside of the visitor's center. We saw elk several times when were in this park. In this instance, all of the observing park visitors were standing about 50 yards form the elk, and the animals did not look at all bothered by the dozens of people watching them and snapping photos. I took this photo because I was trying to get a close up view of the one elk that was standing up, but there were probably at least 20 elk grazing or sitting down in this large field.
When I was researching the redwood parks, I learned about a place called Fern Canyon. Other travelers described Fern Canyon as a unique place that is completely unlike any other area of the redwood parks. The overwhelmingly positive comments from other travelers convinced me that we needed to visit Fern Canyon on our trip. In order to access the canyon area, we drove down an 8-mile bumpy and twisting dirt road that was often a one-lane road in many places. Hats off to Scott for handling this drive with an open mind and good skill.
The drive was worth it. The reward at the end of the journey was a trek through a shady canyon surrounded by 50-foot walls draped with seven different kinds of ferns.
The fern coverage on the walls was amazing, and (to quote my words above) unlike anything I had ever seen before, and definitely very different than the densely wooded redwood areas of the forest.
Amelia and John proclaimed this the "best hike ever" because it was a climbing and maneuvering adventure. The bottom of the canyon was wet in many places, which meant that we had to walk across wood planks or fallen logs, and climb over rocks, to move deeper into the canyon. John being John, he particularly enjoyed jumping on the boards that crossed the small stream on the floor.
I am quite grateful that we were able to visit Fern Canyon. It was awesome. A small stream of water was running down the wall in several places, including behind Amelia and John in the photo below.
After our visit to Fern Canyon, it was time for us to exit the parks and continue the drive south. We found Six Rivers Brewery in Arcata for a very late lunch, which turned out to be a good brewery with even better food. The views of the Pacific from the restaurant's parking lot were great as well.
Amelia and Scott were happy campers after a satisfying meal. After we ate, we finished driving south to Eureka, our stop for the evening. While much of Eureka had the same grunginess to it as Crescent City, Eureka did have a more organized "downtown", and the harbor area was pretty.
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