HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAYLE! WE HOPE TO SEE YOU IN MARCH! DID YOU GET THE TEXTS? NO INTERNET CONNECTION & LOUSY PHONE CONNECTION; TOOK A CHANCE THAT YOU MIGHT RECEIVE TEXTS……
Day 50 – Beginning of Week 8 – Redwood Trees! We got up at 7:30 a.m., 46 degrees & sunny. Today we will explore the redwood forest by car and on foot. There’s an area in Redwood National Park which has been recommended to us by several people. It’s a dirt road, Howland Hill Road; it’s located near Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. An incredibly scenic drive, there was a turnout & small parking lot about 4 miles in where you can park at the trail head and walk through Stout Grove, home to some of the most magnificent old growth redwood trees available for people to easily walk to.
This was an incredible day. We left around 10 a.m., sunny & 50 degrees, paid $15 for two more nights at the campground on our way out. We stopped at the Smith River NRA visitor’s center in Gasquet, a small town west of our campground, and picked up some helpful pamphlets about the trails & the redwood trees. The forest rangers were quite informative & they recommended several places we could go during our stay in the area. One of them was to “take a drive up the Old Gasquet Toll Road to the three ponds where, if there was enough water, we might see salmon spawning”. Another thing for us to do here – YAAA! We learned that there are 3 kinds of reddood trees in the world; 2 kinds grow in CA: the Giant Sequoia and the Coast Redwood.
From the 2014 brochure, “California’s Redwood State Parks”, below are some redwood tree statistics and a comparison between the 2 kinds of CA redwood trees, followed by a little redwood tree history from the same brochure:
Coast Redwoods grow in pockets on a 450-mile-long stretch of coast from central CA north to just across the OR border. The tallest trees in the world, the tallest known Coast Redwood is 379 feet, taller than a 30-story building. It has about 1.12 billion needles. Tall & lean, 12-16 feet in diameter six feet above the ground, they have thinner branches than the Giant Sequoias. Its bark is up to 1-foot thick at the base of the largest trees with almost no flammable pitch or resin. Their wood contains chemicals – tannins & phenolics – that make it more resistant to invasion & decay than other trees. (Douglas Fir, for example, hosts 30 species of bark beetles in redwood forests while Coast Redwoods host only four.) The Coast Redwood has a life span up to about 2,500 years; in their early years, they follow the same growth pattern as Giant Sequoias, but generally surpass them in height somewhere between 50 & 100 years of age.
Giant Sequoia Redwoods are found in 75 groves on western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada range. They are the most massive trees in the world. The largest known Giant Sequoia, the General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park, is 275 feet tall, 36.5 feet in diameter at its base, and has about 1.94 billion leaves. Their trunks are stouter than the Coast Redwood, with thicker branches. Giant Sequoia trunks reach 20-30 feet in diameter, six feet above ground. Their bark is 1-2 feet thick at the base of the largest trees, with the same fire-resistant qualities as Coast Redwoods. Their wood has decay-resistant chemical qualities, also, but it fractures more easily & is less valuable for timber than the Coast Redwood. The life span of the Giant Sequoia is up to about 3,200 years. Overall, they grow more slowly than Coast Redwoods, reaching 100 feet tall at 150 years old.
Native peoples along the northern & central CA coast lived respectfully among redwoods for centuries. They considered the trees to be “a special gift from the Great Creator. Destroy these trees and you destroy the Creator’s love…and you will eventually destroy mankind”. When gold was discovered in 1848, hundreds of thousands of newcomers came to CA. Some cleared redwood forests for pastures & farms. Others sold redwood products to booming communities. Thousand-year-old trees were cut down to make posts, shingles, grape stakes, & railroad ties.
Save the Redwoods League began to fight back in 1918. Along with other organizations, the League raised millions of dollars, bought threatened stands of ancient redwoods, and transferred them to the State for protection as public parks. According to an early League director, Newton B. Drury, they were often “just a jump ahead of the sawmills”. There were originally 2 million acres of Coast Redwoods; 118,000 acres remain today. About 5% of the world’s old-growth redwoods exist today, and more than 95% of the world’s old-growth redwoods are in CA. Of those older & old-growth redwoods still in existence, about 80% are protected in parks & reserves. Ordinary people made those first preserves possible – and have helped establish the 49 state parks that protect redwoods today.
When we read this, we decided we were going to try to go to each of the 49 CA Redwood State
Parks. We’re taking a picture of the sign at each Park we visit. Number One:
Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, CA
Back to our journey: On the way from the visitor’s center to the Park, we crossed the beautiful Smith River on a small bridge.
Smith River, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, CA
There was a sign before entering the bridge which said “Dismount Horse Before Crossing Bridge”. I wanted to get a picture of this sign, but we kept forgetting to go back to get it. We soon turned onto Howland Hill Road, and neither one of us had ever seen anything like it! It was a small very winding dirt road, well-maintained in most places, with many turnouts & trails off into the woods with places to park amongst the tremendous trees to view them or get on a trail and walk. In some places the road was barely wide enough for one car to get through – you could reach out and touch the HUGE trees from the car as you drove by.
It was a perfect day for a hike so we parked near Stout Grove. Absolutely amazing. One wonders what it would’ve been like to be a Native American living in these woods before we arrived and kicked them off their land. The trees in the Redwood National and State Parks have been preserved to prevent logging, thank goodness. Stout Grove was part of the property donated for preservation by Frank Deming Stout. (We had thought it was called “Stout Grove” because the trees were so stout, ha ha.) Because it was a week day in late October & the weather was cool, I’m sure it was much less crowded than it would’ve been in the summer. Still, the parking lot for Stout Grove was full. I cannot imagine wall-to-wall cars travelling this narrow road in the summer – talk about a traffic jam…..a totally different experience would be had by all, not good!
In Stout Grove the trail meandered by some tremendously huge trees which had fallen over; you could stand by the root system that had been unearthed, leaving a big hole in the ground. Standing there, the fallen tree was taller than Rob or me & you could not see beyond it. I can’t imagine the noise when one of these trees went down, crashing into other trees, I’m sure the ground shook. Surprisingly, we didn’t encounter too many people on this trail. It was just beautiful and surreal being there with these giants. It felt prehistoric. You could see where they had been hit by lightning – they survived and kept on growing. Or in places there had once been a fire – they survived and kept on growing. The really large redwood trees that line the roads, some of them have dents where they’ve been hit by a car as it comes around the bend – they survived and kept on growing. Words & pictures cannot begin to adequately describe the experience of walking & driving among these giants. You’d have to be there. And we hope everyone someday will get the opportunity to come here and walk through the woods.
Stout Grove, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, CA
For lots more pictures of the Stout Grove,
Click Here
It never reached 60 degrees today but the sun was warm. Later in the afternoon when we got back to the RV, we sat outside in the screened tent & marveled about the day. Wonderful.
Treehugger (Vicki)! Stout Grove, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, CA
Rob, Stout Grove, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Crescent City, CA
Thank you so much for the pictures and education. Your descriptions are wonderful. How I wish we were in your backpacks. Cheers, Diane