California Dude!

2018-09-19
Redwoods CA

Leaving a campground you have to yourself is always a little bittersweet. But I got up as usual at 6:00 and got ready, moving the cones closing the lane so I could drive out at 7:00 and headed down the Redwood Highway to California.

I have a friend who ran the Philadelphia Half Marathon. He was listening to tunes and the running app would tell him how far he had gone every half mile. At the 12 mile mark he was feeling pretty good about himself, and when 13 miles came up he knew he was almost done. When 13.5 arrived and still no finish line, he was perplexed, looking over his shoulder to see if he missed it. 14 came and still no finish. He was beginning to think he was an ultra half-marathoner when the finish finally arrived. The answer is simple: GPS uses line-of-sight for positioning, and the tall buildings had interfered with it. At one point it had jumped him half a mile to the west, and then at the end of the block got it right again, but making him think that he had gone another mile. Side note: that half-mile jump west and back is still his personal record for fastest mile.

All this is just to say that redwood trees are like tall buildings; they can block the GPS signal. That makes my distance measurements quite fuzzy today. And because I know that I just used a simile, Mr. Casey (my 7th grade English teacher at Skyline) would be proud. I daresay he was more exasperated when I was actually in his class.

My first hike was at the Stout's Grove. It's about a mile loop through some great tall trees. These things are immense, both in height and girth. I'm not even going to try to describe how big because I cannot do it justice. Even the pictures mostly look like the tops of trees or large bases but you cannot really comprehend it until you walk among them.

Also, when you're hiking, allow some extra time. You will have to take time to look up, at which point you cannot see the path. Redwoods have apparently spent eons laying a series of traps where they make you look up and at the same time try to snag your feet. Cats employ a similar trip tactic, although they wait for you to be distracted on your own. Perhaps the species are related?

Next up was Boy Scout Tree Trail which wanders out and back for a total of about 6.5 miles. The actual tree is just a triple-trunk redwood, but the path continues on past that to an unusual (yet not spectacular) waterfall. I suspect most of the boy scouts turn around at the tree because the path beyond it is in much worse condition.

The Redwood State and National Parks are all kind of glued together (the sign even says "Redwood State and National Parks"), and these two hikes were in one of the state parks. I wanted to do at least one hike in the National Park so I swung by the visitors center. I was going to do the Tall Trees Loop, but the Trillium Falls Loop was 45 minutes closer and good enough for me. The trilliums were not in bloom, but the hike was once again through old growth redwoods. There was one that was hollow and you could walk inside which was fun.

I also stopped along the way to dip my toes in the Pacific. It's cold, so that served as icing a sore ankle.

My campground was also close to this hike, so I got there early and did some laundry before dinner and then winding down for the evening. It's one of the coldest evenings at about 60 degrees at 5:00 PM, but it shouldn't drop much lower than 55 tonight. I fell asleep listening to the sound of the surf.

Hiking Distance: 10 miles