Trailer Trip 2014: Redwoods

We left camp at Crater Lake Friday morning, October 17, and drove to Redwoods National and State Parks at Crescent City, California. We left about 7:00 and got here around 11:00 and got a good campsite. This is more dry camping, no hookups, strictly on battery and propane and holding our own used water. Getting in early, we were able to spend some of this afternoon looking at trees.

Remember when I expressed that the 4 to 6 foot diameter cedar tree was the biggest I had ever seen? That record was surpassed many times over in one afternoon today. We walked around in the Stout Redwood Grove just outside of Crescent City. These are Coast Redwoods and a lot of them are 15 to 16 feet in diameter. How do I know that? I stepped them off, even walked around the circumference and did the arithmetic. One living, apparently healthy tree measured 21 feet in diameter. They can be 300 feet tall. That was what it said in the book, I couldn’t measure that. The book also said they can be 26 feet in diameter. The bigger ones are so straight and tall and mostly have no limbs except near the top, maybe the last 100 feet.

This grove of Redwoods is set aside for preservation and protection and is part of the California State Park system. The Coast Redwood is one of three known species of Redwood trees. We’ll see another later in the trip, the Sequoia Redwoods.

We didn’t complete the trip we were on Friday because of rain so we went back today, Saturday.

The camera can’t capture the size of these trees. There is no perspective where you can show an entire tree except right next to it and shooting straight up and then you can barely tell what it is. In fact, I found that my mind can’t even absorb the scene. We both were constantly head bobbing up and down and side to side. This is a place of the gargantuan. We stood small before these gigantic living things. The relative scale of tree to man is not only of size but also time. These large trees may be 2000 years old. What was the world like when the 21 foot Redwood was a sapling? It may have been 15 feet in diameter and a couple of hundred feet tall in the time of Columbus.