To the redwoods

EarthDate: 2014 July 5th
Location: In transit.

Today was one of the long drives, heading mostly North and then West through California until we arrived at Crescent City.

 389 miles -- the 6 hours and 43 minutes is optimistic!

We filled the car up in Redding, and grabbed some sandwiches to eat as we headed West. The westward part of the journey, through Whiskeytown and the Trinity mountain range was very sparsely populated. I had only heard of this place because Dan Phillips (graduate student at UC Davis) sometimes makes the drive up here for the dark skies when he is stargazing.

We arrived at the coast around 4:30, and made an hour long stop at the Ladybird Johnson Grove Trail in the redwoods. For the non-Americans: Ladybird Johnson was the nickname of former first lady Claudia Johnson. This grove gets good reviews on yelp, but we considered it average (although we did not have the cool mist that aided a lot of the shots on yelp).

Amanda and Zach on the trail (LBJ Grove -- note how LadyBird Johnson abbreviates to LBJ!)

Inside a burned out redwood tree
(they burn from the inside, but the bark is resilient)

Cool squirrel (?) carving on the side of one of the trees.

The size of the trees is difficult to capture, here is an attempt to do that by comparing them with some random strangers:

An attempt to provide persecutive on the redwoods

Once we were done in the forest, we went up to Crescent city for dinner and supplies before heading to setup camp. The campsite was secluded and impressive. 

Path leading to campsite (~10 meters)

Group portrait in our little cove

The evening ended with us escaping the blood-thirsty mosquitos around dusk by going into the tent and playing Settlers of Catan. Amanda and I slept well on the air mattress; Zach struggled a little bit (but in fairness was also sleeping on the ground).

Tomorrow: off to the Trees of Mystery! [wiki link, not blog link]

Damien out