Redwoods

We took a trip to the Redwoods for President's Day. It usually rains a lot up on the North Coast (about 5 hours north of San Francisco), but the weather forecast looked great. We spent 3 nights in Eureka, and did some day hikes along the coast and into the different Redwood parks. The first hike took us to Fern Canyon, which by itself was fairly disappointing. But there was almost nobody on the trail, and we hiked through this great Redwood Forest surrounded by the 300 feet tall giants for 4 hours in awe! The light plays through the trees, and you feel like you're in a different world; amazing:



I brought my "real" camera for this trip, so these pictures are made by Sabine (nice job). The height of the trees is hard to capture, but here's a try:




It is sad to know that these trees were once present along the majority of the coastline until humanity thought they would make great building materials. Some of the trees are more than 2,000 years old.

The area is also very popular with elk, who hang out in groups and are protected within all the park lands. They are used to cars and visitors, so you can get pretty close from within your vehicle:


The next day we hiked around in some more redwood groves, especially the Ladybird Johnson Grove where the National Park was dedicated was very nice:




We also went to the Coast, where it was very cold and foggy. It was low tide, so we went tide pooling and saw some interesting sea creatures, including this sea star: