Trees Of Mystery

So there's a slightly (?) cheesy tourist attraction just south of Crescent City called Trees of Mystery. There are good parts of it, but there's also a giant Babe the Blue Ox (anatomically correct) in front. I find it an odd place to go see redwoods, though, because there's beautiful old growth forest nearby, so I don't understand going to see named, not terribly old redwoods instead. But that's just me, and Trees of Mystery is a venerable institution.

The real trees of mystery are the redwoods themselves. I always appreciate them when I get to drive through them (as I may tomorrow). They are overwhelmingly ancient and wild and beautiful on an ordinary day. But then there are days when the sun and fog play together particularly well and people are able to get photos like this:

Michael was in the redwoods for such a day today. Pretty good for an iPhone, once again.

Hold On To Your Hats!

The deluge will soon begin. I have (perhaps foolishly) signed up for NaBloPoMo, otherwise known as National Blog Posting Month. It started as a tie-in to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I was briefly considering participating in NaNoWriMo, but decided that November was busy enough without contemplating writing 50,000 words of fiction! And since I learned last night that I'm headed to Washington for the second half of this week, I'm glad I made that decision.

I figured I could handle NaBlogPoMo a little easier than the novel, so you can look forward to new blog posts EVERY DAY in November. I'll do a little catching up of our lives in the beautiful redwoods.

We spent part of today in the redwoods, as it happens. I'll save some details for November (see how I'm already thinking ahead?), but the park opened its first new trail in a decade this morning with a dedication ceremony near the plaque commemoring Lady Bird Johnson's dedication of Redwood National Park and a ribbon cutting at the trail head. We didn't join the inaugural hike because Michael was a shuttle driver, taking folks back to their cars if they weren't hiking either.

Wish me luck and check back every day in November for exciting new blog posts!

Tall Trees Trail And False Klamath Cove

We live in an amazing part of the world. Sometimes we pine for more services that don't require an hour and a half drive, but then we have days like this. A couple weeks ago, we had a beautiful day and we drove down to Orick to get a permit to hike the Tall Trees Trail. It is a crazy-steep trail that leads, as the name suggests, to a grove of particularly tall redwoods, including the tree that was measured by National Geographic for the article that eventually led to Redwoods National Park. The hike led down to the Redwood Creek drainage and the trees at the bottom were, indeed, very, very tall!!

We had a great day. We put our feet in the creek, saw frogs and dragonfly nymphs, hiked a gorgeous trail and stopped at the beach on the way home to satisfy Darcy's ocean fetish.

We also became famous! Once you get down to the actual Tall Trees Grove, the trail makes a mile-long loop. As we were getting back to the start of the loop, I happened to look down and saw an eggshell. It was from a marbled murrelet -- an endangered bird that nests only in the tallest redwoods.

We were very excited to see it and spent quite a bit of time admiring it and debating whether (as I prefer to believe) it was cleaned out of the nest after the baby had hatched or if it was an unfortunate example of predation by a raven or other murrelet-eater. But once Michael started mentioning it to other park staff, the excitement grew exponentially. All the marbled murrelet experts have been chiming in opinions about hatchling vs. predation and one of them thinks he's identified the branch the nest's on in this tree:

It was a very special experience and one that we've been assured is probably a once in a lifetime occurrence. Apparently, it's almost never happened before. Luckily, the rest of the hike can be recreated whenever we want, although never quite the same.

This view, for instance, isn't going anywhere any time soon unless there's a very serious storm. We spent quite a lot of time on this gravel bar, playing with rocks and water and eating lunch. That's Michael with Darcy in the backpack in the foreground. It's hard to get a photo that does justice to the massive size of the redwoods. This one comes close, but it's still a little short of the mark.

Once we returned to the trail after our gravel bank rest, we went through a section that captivated me. Throughout this area, there are trees that are completely covered with moss, lichens, ferns, and various other hangers-on. There's a short section of 101 near Klamath that is a tunnel of these green trees. I love them. I can't believe they can live with all the extra vegetation covering their trunks and branches, but apparently, they do. The trail guide claims that all the vegetation is made up of true epiphytes that don't take nutrients from the tree itself at all. I guess I should believe it, because the trees are leafing out these days! They are really magical.

When we were leaving the gravel bar, Darcy didn't want to leave the water. And we convinced her to leave by promising that we could stop at a beach on the way home. We stopped at False Klamath Cove, which is a beautiful stretch of beach across the "highway" from the now-closed youth hostel. For those of you who think that 101 is a six to eight lane monster, this is our version of 101: hugging the thin strip of flat space between the rocky edge of the beach and that steep hill.

We always think that we'll be able to keep Darcy from going in past her ankles. Or we think it will be too cold for her. Or something. She started this beach adventure fully dressed with her pants rolled up to her knees. By this picture, the pants were already soaked and the shirt was getting there, too.

Michael was her shadow for most of this beach visit, making sure that she didn't just walk straight in, which is what she seems to want to do. He got maybe just a little bit wet.

Or maybe a lot! Darcy's down to just panties at this point. She ended up "wearing" my shirt for the ride home because there was nothing dry of hers. She had fun, though, and once again, we had to take her up to the car screaming that she wanted to stay. Somehow, the fact that she's so cold her lips are turning blue and she has lobster-red legs doesn't make her want to get out of the water AT ALL.

All in all, it was a good day.

Darcy Does Good Works!

Yesterday was a good day for the Glore household. I was watching over the first of a series of gardening classes I helped arrange with the local community college. We had 41 people show up on a sunny Saturday morning! And the farmer who taught it went half an hour over the two hours allotted for the class -- and only three people left before he was done! It was pretty incredible. I'm probably going to teach the next one in May because having been turned down by said farmer to teach it, I don't really have enough time to find someone else by tomorrow's deadline for the course listing.

As some of you know, I was in LA last week for training. In the Volunteer Development class, our table group had to create a poster representing our collective volunteer experience, including how many generations of our family had done volunteer work of some kind, and at what age we first volunteered. If Darcy is ever in that same position, she'll have some good tales to tell. While I was at the college yesterday morning, Darcy and Michael helped restore the Mill Creek drainage by planting redwood seedlings. Darcy was very proud:

And very protective and happy:

She and Michael made a great team on those steep slopes:

Right now, thanks to her trip on the pirate ship (ok, just a wooden sailing vessel, really), she's in bed singing the "heave away, haul away" lines from Bound for South Australia. Pirates didn't grab her fancy in the same way as the Wright Brothers, who have been making a small comeback recently. It's sad, but one of the best entertainments we have is listening to the things that come out of her mouth as she's supposed to be falling asleep. Tonight, she's in rare form with the sea shanties.

Boy Scout Tree Trail

As part of our Christmas/New Year's outdoor fest, we hiked the Boy Scout Tree Trail last weekend. It is a gorgeous trail leading to a smallish waterfall. We started it later than we should have due to an untimely nap, but we forged ahead and managed to get to the waterfall and back before Michael's headlamp was necessary. Near the beginning of the trail, Darcy was in the backpack, but soon after they posed near this leaning redwood, she got out and hiked on her own for (we estimated) about .75 miles!

Darcy and I disappear among the trees (you may have to enlarge the picture to see us).

The fern mass on the trunk near the left of the picture is huge, but the picture I took that gave some sense of just how huge didn't come out very well.

Part of the trail ran right alongside and old redwood log. It was gorgeous.

The final destination: Fern Falls.

In Search Of The Wonder Stump

When we drive north to Oregon, we cross over a road called Wonder Stump Road and ever since the first time we noticed it, we of course wondered just what the Wonder Stump(s) is (are).

Our local paper has a column once a week that consists of short reprinted articles from past papers. Shortly after we got here, it included a story about the origin of the Wonder Stumps. I told Michael about it, because we'd discussed this question already, but he had heard something different at work. We kept meaning to go in search of the Wonder Stump/s, but hadn't.

Christmas Eve day was sunny and pretty nice, so we decided to begin our search. Michael found an article from the Daily Triplicate's sister paper, the Curry Pilot, about a reporter, new to the area, who went searching for the Wonder Stump without success. It contained more information and seemed to clear up the question of whether there is more than one. It also included an old photo and vague location, so we thought we'd be able to find it.

As it turns out, we couldn't. It didn't matter, though, because we had a beautiful drive through second growth forest on Wonder Stump Road and saw gorgeous old-growth stumps left from logging a hundred or more years ago. In particular, we found this cluster of burned (very tall) stumps. I spied them from the road and they are unbelievably massive and beautiful.

Michael in front of the fire cave at the base of one stump, in the "front".

Michael and Darcy in another fire cave in the "back".

Michael and Darcy, again for scale, because it's hard to appreciate how massive these things are even when you're standing in front of them.

Looking up from the base of one of the stumps. It's hard to tell if these were logged or burned as living trees (as described in the first article), but redwoods don't burn easily. They just seem like very tall "stumps" for logging.

We're hoping to find the Wonder Stump one day. In the meantime, there are some historic and modern photographs of it here (you'll have to scroll down to the part about the "Del Norte Wonder Stump) and here.