Return to the redwoods

My last visit to the redwoods in 2016 was a chance to spend some one-on-one time with my daughter, The Artist, and think about my professional future (Mr. Adventure had the flu and had to stay home, poor guy). In my very first blog post, I wrote about how the trip helped me decide to write full-time.

This year, we decided to return to the redwoods. In August, The Artist will leave for college halfway across the country. We are thrilled for her, and it’s fun to watch her transition into this exciting new life. Mr. Adventure and I realized that we’ve almost run out of school breaks for the three of us to spend time together. Better grab the opportunity.

The redwoods are a seven-hour drive from Olympia. The further south we drove, the more spring had sprung. The sky became bluer, and what were buds back home were full-fledged blossoms by the time we made our first stop in Albany, Oregon, for lunch at Burgerville, a road-trip tradition. We decided to stop at Sea Lion Caves on the central Oregon coast and stay overnight in Bandon, about 100 miles north of the park.

A national park?

Visiting Sea Lion Caves was a pilgrimage of sorts, because it’s where Mr. Adventure became a political activist. As a freckled eight-year-old, he visited “America’s Largest Sea Cave” and its resident Steller sea lions and decided the site should be a national park. He wrote to his congresswoman, Edith Green, requesting the change. Alas, he was unsuccessful, but he’s had a soft spot for the caves ever since.

Sea Lion Caves retains its classic mid-20th century family destination feel. Pay your entry fee ($14 for adults) and head either to an overlook where you can watch a herd of sea lions basking in the sun, barking and growling at each other, or to the elevator that takes you into the cave and the sea lions hanging out inside. We opted for the overlook first. Approaching the viewing platform, we walked into a wall of smell: a combination of sun-warmed pinnipeds and their fishy diet. Whew. Peering over the railing, there they were, perhaps 80 sea lions lying on the rocks below, with another dozen or more in the water, scouting landing spots. Distressingly, one poor creature near the water’s edge was wearing a choker made of bright green fishing net. We hoped the researchers who study the sea lions and birds at the caves would be able to remove the tangle of net.

We rode the elevator down to the cave’s interior, where another hundred or more sea lions lounged on the rocks or bobbed in the water. The smell was just as intense here, and the noise echoed off the walls. From the old entrance to the cave on the north end (it’s been a tourist attraction since the 1930s), we had a great view of Heceta Head lighthouse and the cliffs that house seabird colonies.

Crescent City and the redwoods

The next morning, we arrived in Crescent City, California, the northern gateway to the park. Just like in 2016, we stayed at the marvelous Curly Redwood Lodge, a midcentury modern treasure built from the timber of one giant curly redwood tree in 1957. About 10 percent of redwoods have a genetic mutation that makes their grain wavy or curly instead of straight, but it’s impossible to tell from the bark. The lodge’s doors, trim, baseboards, and paneling are made of beautiful, glowing curly redwood. As a midcentury modern fan, I have a soft spot for the lodge, which like Sea Lion Caves hearkens back to a more optimistic time in American history, albeit one shadowed by the Cold War and growing civil discontent. The lodge is a living relic that predates the national park by more than a decade.

Congress established Redwood National Park in 1968. Ten years later, when the remaining groves were imperiled by logging, the national park boundary was expanded to encompass three California state parks created in the 1920s to protect redwood forests: Jedediah Smith, Prairie Creek, and Del Norte Coast. In 1994, the federal and state governments began cooperatively managing the parks as Redwood National and State Parks, so you’re as likely to spot a California State Parks ranger as you are to see a Park Service flat hat. A combined 130,000 acres in size, these parks protect about 40,000 acres of ancient redwoods. It’s hard to imagine that before 1850 there were 2 million acres of coast redwood forest. Less than 5 percent of the old growth remains.

Into the park

We settled in, grabbed a few caffeinated beverages at Dutch Bros. Coffee (another road-trip tradition), and headed to the park. The Artist and I wanted to show Mr. Adventure the places we’d been two years earlier, so we started with a picnic lunch overlooking the mouth of the Klamath River. The California sunshine warmed us despite a stiff breeze, and we chatted with Michigander Sam, whose Air Force cap and ramrod posture belied his military background. Retired now, he, his wife, and their dog were driving an RV around the country. Crater Lake was the next stop, provided the snow had melted enough. We wished them well and found our way down to the beaches at the estuary.  

The Klamath River trail leads past traditional buildings used by the Yurok Tribe, whose reservation reaches 44 miles upriver and bisects the park. We saw some tribal fishermen at the river, perhaps hoping to hook Pacific lampreys, a valuable food source. The mouth of the Klamath shifts constantly, and this year we could not walk out to the ocean. But in what was starting to feel like a theme, we spotted a raft of seals on the far shore. We each squinted through the binoculars, trying to determine whether these were more Steller sea lions or smaller harbor seals. The Artist declared them seals, and I agreed. Mr. Adventure thought sea lions. Later that day at the Thomas B. Kuchel Visitor Center (named for the Republican senator who sponsored the 1968 park bill), a ranger confirmed The Artist’s conclusion, saying they were most likely harbor seals hauled out on the beach.

Tempting though it was to lounge against the rocks and watch the sun descend in the west, we had more on our list. Like the big trees.

The redwoods

Coast redwood forests feel different. For one thing, although redwoods rely on the moisture in coastal fog for water, they don’t grow well in direct exposure to the ocean. The biggest trees grow in valleys separated from the ocean by ridges. Their distribution is limited to a strip less than 500 miles long and between 5 and 45 miles wide. Because the redwoods make up the southernmost end of the Pacific rainforest belt, the forest understory contains plants typical of Pacific Northwest forests, with rhododendron, sword fern, marsh marigold, and trillium making springtime appearances. But the redwood forest feels more open, partly because when a redwood falls, it clears a wide, long path, often taking out other trees on its crashing descent. This, the occasional fire, and branches that start high on the trunks, create a more open feel. By contrast, Northwest forests can feel dark and forbidding. Tangles of underbrush make cross-country movement laughably difficult; it took six months for an early exploring party, the Press Expedition, to traverse the Olympic Mountains in the early 1890s. Northwest trees sometimes seem like they’re out to get you, or at least make your passage challenging.

But the redwoods are neither enemy nor ally. They stand, impassive, backlit and spotlit. The light streams through the canopy and picks out every floating leaf and dust mote. It’s easy to gaze at redwoods and see Tolkien’s Ents, slow to act because their time is arboreal, not human. The sense of eons pervades the redwoods, continually stopping us in our tracks to crane necks and look up, up, up to their impossibly tall crowns. In the Lady Bird Johnson Grove, even a fair number of people on the trail, including many small children, could do no more than briefly disturb the forest’s repose.

Fern Canyon

The mystical feeling continued as we drove back to the coast over narrow, twisting, packed-dirt Davison Road through a redwood-mixed conifer forest to Gold Bluffs Beach. Several miles of potholed, rutted road and three stream crossings later, we arrived at the Fern Canyon trailhead parking lot, bustling with cars and people. Part of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, the trail to Fern Canyon is wide and easy, then disappears underwater as you enter the canyon. The choice is to immerse your feet and deal with sopping shoes or navigate the icy water and rock-filled streambed barefoot. Mr. Adventure heroically went back to the car for flip-flops and sandals for The Artist and me, and appropriately shod, we headed into an otherworldly realm of fern-draped walls with mixed conifer forest high above.

Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway

We’d already hiked quite a bit, but couldn’t resist one more walk along Prairie Creek that started at the Prairie Creek Visitor Center and looped past the Big Tree, a 320-foot specimen that towers right next to the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway. In the 1920s and 1930s, Drury was executive director of the Save-the-Redwoods League, formed to fight for preservation of the big trees. In 1940, he was appointed director of the National Park Service. Drury held that position until 1951, when he resigned over the Secretary of Interior’s support of dam building in Dinosaur National Monument, a controversy many consider the beginning of the modern environmental movement. In the 1950s, Drury served as director of what is now California State Parks. The Parkway named in his honor recognizes his contributions toward preserving the redwoods, and the grove named for him is one of many along this road that visitors can stop and explore.

Jedediah Smith State Park

The last stop on our way out of town, Jedediah Smith State Park contains some of the most magnificent groves of trees in the park. Driving the narrow Howland Hill Road (“motor homes and trailers not advised”), we opened the sunroof and stopped frequently to take pictures and simply gaze upward. At the Stout Grove, massive root burls towered above my head. Mr. Adventure clambered onto a fallen redwood that created a new path through the forest.

After a stop at the Hiouchi Information Center on the park boundary, we merged on to the Redwood Highway and headed toward I-5 and, after the requisite stops at Burgerville and Dutch Bros. Coffee, home. It’s a safe bet that Mr. Adventure and I will especially treasure this particular road trip, one that, with our daughter preparing to head to college, marked an ending and a new beginning.