Hiking

Today (Sunday) was our first full day without traveling. After a surprisingly cold night, given our proximity to the ocean, we had breakfast and set out in the truck. We started at the Redwood National and State Park Visitor Center, picked up a map, a pocket book with some hikes, and some tips from the ranger.

Our next stop was Lady Bird Johnson Redwood grove. The grove has a loop trail about 2 miles long. As with many of the hikes we've done today and yesterday, there were many huge redwoods, the greenery was dense and the sights pretty spectacular.

Then we drove to the parking area/trail head for a hike of the Fern Canyon. The parking lot there was near the ocean so we ate lunch before setting out on the hike. The trail runs along the side of a stream and the vertical walls of the canyon are covered with dense ferns. Connie walked by a snake on the trail and I pointed it out. He didn't stick around long enough to get a good picture.

On returning to the car, we walked out onto the beach. We had driven about 8 miles down a dirt road to get to the trail head and while there were people coming and going, the beach was almost deserted due to it's distance from easy access points. It was sand for as far as you could see in either direction and only about 15 people.

Then we were off to hike to Trillium Falls, which at this point in the year didn't have a lot of water, but was still pretty. We saw one of the infamous banana slugs on this hike. It's appearance reminded me of some folks I deal with when I'm not on vacation. If you've seen one, you'll know what I mean.

As we drove back towards the main road, we came upon a herd (I guess it's called a herd) of elk in a meadow. We got some photos of them, I'd guess there were 20-30. Further down the road we saw two very large male elk in the front yard of some cabins. There was a guy with a dog near them, one of the elk them never even stood up. Then it was back to the campground to fix dinner.

Some of the written stuff we had on the hikes talked about the age of the trees and how long the cycles take from seedling to mature tree to when they eventually fall and become a huge decomposing log. All of the big trees had been through a number of lightening fires and survived; the perpetual and self-correcting aspect of the natural system made me think of what George Carlin said about our ability to screw up the planet in the long term – the time frame that matters to the planet. “The planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, the planet will be fine”. We may really make a mess of things in the short term, but in the time frame of nature, he was right.