California of the Giants

I'm not talking baseball here. Read on...

Heading south out of Crescent City this morning I stopped at the joint Redwoods National and State Park headquarters and picked up a map and brochure, then ended up doing different things than I initially planned. Everything worked, even when it was a mistake.

Morning fog was rolling in off the Pacific and hiding the hilltops. I'd planned to hike a mile-long hilly trail at Enderts Beach but missed the turnoff, so I first tried the Klamath River overlook. The view from the top was pea soup, but on the way down the switchback road I found a Prius-sized turnout with this view of the sandspit at the river's mouth. The Pacific is to the right, as you can see by the white line of gentle surf breaking on the spit.

I crossed the river in sun a short distance upstream, then turned onto the Coastal Drive. The sun disappeared again as I reached the spit at its other end. Here's a view showing one of the rocks at either end of the spit. The Yurok natives believed that two spirits, old Oregos and her sister (this rock), looked after their success in fishing.

The eight-mile drive is largely unpaved, one lane wide, and at one point dips down and back up for 20 feet or so at an alarming angle, but Penny the Prius handled it like a champ. I saw many cars in overlooks but fortunately met none coming toward me. A local man and his mother told me that this was the coastal highway (now U.S. 101) until maybe the 1930s.

Another highlight of the Coastal Drive is this farmhouse and its shed that were actually a World War II radar station designed to look innocent from the air. Behind the dormer windows are just the shingles of the roof, and window frames on the back side reveal only another blank wall of cinder blocks.

I excitedly photographed some skinny redwoods along this road, but I'm leaving them out of this post. Little did I know what was coming...

My next excursion off Route 101 was to Lost Man Creek. I did a two-mile round-trip walk up this easy trail and back; the entire trail is 11 miles one way. I excitedly photographed some tall redwoods up to maybe six feet in diameter and took some shots of the creek, but all you're getting is this lovely view of the sun-dappled trail through the redwoods. Little did I know what was coming...

Coming into the city of Eureka I snapped this photo through the windshield of part of a long, fragrant windbreak of eucalyptus trees someone had once planted.

Here I had lunch at an Indian buffet (strange but tasty pakoras that were just individual vegetable slices, breaded and fried). In Eureka I also found, at last, Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia - at a big chain store, unfortunately. When I finish this post I'll plunge right in (thanks again, Jean!).

My map led me to one other Eureka landmark on my way out of town: Fort Humboldt. Once I got there I found the "fort" unexciting, just scattered clapboard barracks and other buildings in a lawn infested with ravenous mosquitoes. I found its history sordid: it was built and operated briefly in the 1850s and 1860s solely as a collection point for Native Americans being uprooted from their homes and shipped to reservations. For unknown reasons a corner of this site was selected in modern times to house a museum of redwood logging, with a half-dozen donkey engines used to snake the huge logs out of the forest (here are three of them), two tiny locomotives, and assorted other artifacts. There's no brochure and it isn't covered in the fort's brochure so I photographed some of the interpretive signs, one of which includes an amusing explanation of the term "donkey engine" that I had never heard: the loggers joked that this steam engine was too tiny to be rated in horsepower.

South of Eureka I saw an exit marked "Avenue of the Giants - scenic alternate route" and took it, since shortly before Eureka Highway 101 had become a boring freeway, as I know it from farther south. I'd never heard of this avenue (now I know that it's famous) but I jumped at the chance to get off the highway, and here's what I found as I drove the entire 31 miles of this former section of Route 101, which parallels the current 101 and crisscrosses the Eel River:

The road is dotted with huge stands of ancient redwoods like the Hank and Florance Saddler Grove near the road's north end. Here the highway runs through a dark tunnel of trees. I pulled off onto the wide shoulder (a rare thing in this country of mountainous switchback roads) and walked into a hushed cathedral of wooden columns, carpeted in fallen needles and decaying wood, with long views between the trunks unimpeded by undergrowth. In front of me was a stump at least 12 feet wide and slightly taller. Just beyond it was the fallen giant you see here, also about 12 feet at the base and stretching out of sight far to the left of this photo's frame. I know I've overused the word in this blog, but...wow. Unfortunately, my camera compensates for low light conditions; this photo doesn't convey the somber lighting of this open space under the high treetops.

For much of its length the road twists and turns up and down hillsides as it winds among huge redwoods. They crowd the pavement so closely, each with its own reflector for safety at night, that I started to imagine that Penny and I were dodging them in a sort of pase taurino, leaning away just enough that the giant would pass harmlessly inches to our right.

When I came to the end of the Avenue of the Giants and rejoined the U.S. 101 freeway it was suddenly 79° outside after several weeks in the 50s (or lower) to low 60s. For the first time since South Dakota I rolled up the windows and turned on the AC. Not to worry: 101 itself soon shrank to a narrow two-lane switchback road among the giants, for a while at least.

When I reached Legget, where I was to turn off U.S. 101 onto CA 1, the coastal highway from here on south, a gas-price gouge derailed my plans. The one station in this remote town was charging 20% more than Oregon stations. With the next services on Route 1 28 miles off and their nature unknown, I returned to 101 hoping for a better result before Penny ran out. Many anxious miles later, in Laytonville, I found a more reasonable price and then embarked on another switchback mountain road across the Coastal Range to get back to Route 1. It was a sometimes hair-raising hour-long crossing but the road was excellent and, guess what, it also at one point wound among close-crowding giant redwood trunks. Moments of shout-out-loud delight.

Because I forgot one of the shortcomings of my GPS I overshot my motel by 12 miles, ending up in Fort Bragg (not the U.S. Marine training base on the opposite coast, of course, but another monument to the 19th-century theft of native lands). I decided I had to come back north to keep my promise to Virgil, the owner since 1973 of the Westport Inn and Deli. I'm so glad I did! I'm in unit 6 (of six, as far as I can tell). The only food in this town, pop. apparently less than 100, is at the Westport Community Store across the street, whose friendly proprietor made me a delicious crab cake sandwich with her homemade aioli and sold me some It's My Fault red table wine from Mendocino County, where I am. The storekeeper was excited to see that there might be an actual sunset and after dinner I walked the few steps from my room to the shore; this view up the coast to the north shows the mist coming in and the bright sky near the horizon to the left, which was even brighter directly to the west. Sign of a good day tomorrow, I hope.

I've changed plans again. Tomorrow I head for Chico, far inland, to visit Rachel's cousin Wren and her husband and son. I may not get to Boulder Creek until Thursday. That's fine with everyone, including me.

Bikes

I've been meaning to tell you about bikes. I mentioned a few bikers clambering up the Beartooth Pass between Montana and Wyoming east of Yellowstone, bike commuters climbing Rattlesnake Drive in Missoula, and of course the wonderful bike lanes in Victoria, BC. U.S. 101 as I've followed it through Washington, Oregon, and California is also the Coastal Bike Route. For most of its length it has a paved (but unfortunately gravel- or sand-littered) shoulder to the right of the white line for bikes, and even when 101 is a freeway in this part of California the much wider shoulder is available to cyclists. On narrower mountainous stretches, bridges, and tunnels in all three states there are signs warning drivers to share the road with bikes, and some bridges and tunnels have systems that warn drivers with flashing lights that bikes are ahead and they must reduce speed. In Washington, and less so in Oregon and California, drivers willingly slow down for bikers and give them a wide berth. I approve!

Sorry this post has been so long. I count eight photos - just think, that's quite restrained since I took 80 today!