Notes from the Road - Day 17

2/15/04 9:45pm Fort Bragg, CA

I was up late last night watching TV, so I got up late this morning. I wanted to get moving, so I skipped the shower and breakfast to get on the road by 9:30am. It wasn’t raining, but the sky was still overcast. I took what I could get.

It didn’t take long to reach the opening of the park on highway 101. This being the off season, there was no one at the visitor center, but I was directed to check the one in Crescent City. This being Sunday, there was no one there either, but I didn’t know that at the time. I grabbed a quick look at the informational display and learned that coastal redwoods are the tallest trees in the world, up to 370 feet, while giant sequoia’s are the thickest around, the heaviest, and the oldest, at 3,200 years. Coastal redwoods get up to 2,000 years old, and used to cover 2 million acres of land in California, but now they’re down to 100,000 acres, mostly in national parks. All I saw today were the coastal redwoods, but they took my breath away.

At my first opportunity, I pulled off the road and took a self-guided walk on two paths among the redwoods. When I laid my hand on the bark of one of them, I felt like I could feel its age resting inside. Some of these trees had sprung up around the same time as Jesus Christ, and they were still here. I saw many trees that had fallen over, pulling up their roots without even breaking them off. This is because the individual trees have a very shallow root system, only 6-10 feet deep due to the abundance of water in the topsoil. This means some of the trees can be blown over by a very strong wind, although others have inter-connected root systems that help them support each other.

Sometimes, only part of the upper portion of a tree breaks off and falls. There was a big example of this lying just beside the path in one area. A man I was talking to said it came down just three or four years ago. He told me this was an extremely mature forest, with many trees dying of old age. Shelf fungi protruded at intervals from some of the dead trees. When just the top breaks off of a tree, it’s common for another redwood to sprout from the trunk or root burls of the old tree. These trees grow much faster than if they’d grown from a seed because they’re able to use the established root system. Sometimes other types of trees grow out of redwood trunks lying on the forest floor. One trunk I got a picture of had another tree’s roots straddling it like a spider’s legs. I saw one redwood trunk whose remains were three, 10-foot-tall, rotting pole-type pieces, two of which were still attached at the top to form an arch, while the third stood freely. It reminded me of a teepee.

The size of these things sneaks up on you. Looking at their tops, you may experience vertigo, but it’s hard to tell at that angle just how far away that top point is. I was sure I’d found the biggest exposed root system possible at 10 feet across, until I found another one 15 feet across. The weight of these things is unimaginable. I got a picture of a special one called the “Immortal Tree” from top to bottom. It lost something like 40 feet from its top when lightning struck it years ago. It also has survived a logger’s axe, a flood, and a fire. It’s still growing green at the top.

After I’d been through both paths, I got back in the car and headed to Crescent City. I picked up a guide to the parks from a box outside the closed visitor center there and drove out to the Battery Park lighthouse. The light’s been automated for years and the structure is now a museum. Outside, there are two good examples of an art form I’ve been seeing since Oregon. It’s apparently popular out here to take a huge tree stump, leave the lower 3 to 5 feet alone as a pedestal, and carve the upper part into a figure of some kind, occasionally painting it as well. I’ve seen a yeti, a cave man, multiple bears, and people. The two at the lighthouse are a whale jumping out of the ocean, painted blue, and a sailor in a yellow slicker at the helm of a ship. They’re all of fine craftsmanship, and I wonder if they’re some kind of homage to totem poles. It’s possible they’re done by Indians.

After I left the city, the afternoon faded quickly. I took an alternate route called the Avenue of the Giants only to find it was a big circle. By the time I passed through the last stand of redwoods, dark was falling and it seemed to feed off the shadows of the trees, huge and ominous. Then I was back on the highway, taking 101 south once more, but I made a terrible decision at Garberville. Instead of finding a place to stay and enjoying myself, I decided to press on for one more town. Then, I came to the fork introducing Highway 1.

I stopped at this fork and considered my options. There was no place to stay in that specific area, and I’d been told Highway 1 was a beautiful drive. On paper, Fort Bragg looked closer than the next town on 101 since it was just 44 miles away, so I took the exit to Highway 1.

I don’t know what the views would’ve been like in the daytime, but if I’d known what I was in for, I would have avoided Highway 1 like the plague. Before I would get near the beach, I would have to cross yet another range of mountains, this time in the rain, in pitch black, on a two-lane road twistier and steeper than anything I’d seen before. The speed limit was never posted, but the yellow warning signs that appeared every few seconds had suggestions that I still couldn’t match. For the next 44 miles, I was driving in start-stop spurts through 180-degree switchbacks, graded curves, and narrow bridges, going anywhere from 20-30 mph most of the way. I was amazed to see not one but two hitchhikers along the road. It took me two hours of white-knuckle driving to finally reach the sea, which I then couldn’t see. I was so relieved when I got to Fort Bragg, and so rattled by the experience, that I jumped when my phone beeped to let me know I had service again, which I’d been missing for the last 100 miles. I checked in with the folks, ate at Denny’s, and checked into the second most expensive hotel I’ve stayed in so far. Ironically, it can’t hold a candle to the Motel 6 I stayed at last night. I hope that drive was worth the view I get tomorrow.