The Avenue of the Giants

 

June 28, 2022

The state of California has two of the three types of Redwoods in the world.  There is the Sequoia-Redwood that is found in the area of Yosemite in Southern California and then the Coastal Redwood that is found from just north of San Francisco to the Oregon-California border.   The coastal redwood is the tallest of all.  One in particular reached a height of 381’.  It fell in 1991 and was so large that it was measured on the Richter scale 50 miles away.  I guess that goes along way in answering the age old question (if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound).  The trip today was to the “Avenue of the Giants”, south of Eureka, CA.

  This is a REAL scenic drive winding through some spectacular trees.  Along this drive there were turnouts, some with trails.

  We stopped at one that had a wonderful trail that wound in and out through some of the tallest of all trees.  This is where the tallest had been standing.  We noticed that this area was covered with lots of downed trees.  Inquiring about this, I was told that this was some of the oldest of the trees and that wind had toppled them.  I guess that when you are the tallest of all, you will feel the wind more than others.  We came upon one tree that had fallen across another downed tree and result was a fracture that filled the area with pieces of wood, looking like giant “pickup sticks”. 

These sticks were actually pieces that were 2 x 4, 2 x 6, 2 x 8 and 2 x 10s.  The floor of the forest is covered with ferns and clover.  Some of the clover was over 10” tall.  Also, these trails were beautiful and easy to walk on.  Sometimes we would come upon the root structure after the tree had fallen, these were massive.

  At the visitor’s center there is an RV that was carved from a redwood log.  I don’t think we will be trading yet.