Paul Bunyan and the trees of mystery

EarthDate: 2014 July 6th,
Location: Redwoods national forest

Ruh-roh gang! A mystery is afoot!

The plan for today was to visit the <scary voice>trees of mystery</scary voice>. What precisely the mystery is ...... well I have been, and I am still not sure. Maybe therein lies the mystery.

We broke out the camping kitchen set for breakfast this morning, and had spam and eggs for breakfast. Then we were off:

Trees of mystery: home to Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe

Today was the day I failed my American folklore quiz. From my time in the states, I had heard of Paul Bunyan before but I had thought of his home as being set in Minnesota. I had not thought he was a west coast (and even a California) character. I actually learned very little about Bunyan from the trip, but from pursuing his wikipedia page [which naturally makes me an expert on the subject ....] it seems that his actual location is just "North American" logging. He appears in as a character in children's books, and dates back to 1916.

The real appeal of the trees of mystery was not the touristy statues, or the gift shop, but the redwoods. Although the giftshop was rather special, as it had a cup that would be quite the talk of the faculty retreat and a pinecone that a certain young Master Berthel would quite enjoy

For young master Berthel ... the largest pinecone I have ever seen!

For the faculty retreat..... keeping it classy

The redwoods were quite spectacular. We went on a short self-guided hike around some very strange looking trees (I think my favorite was the "Family tree" which had other trees growing on its branches).

Part of the attraction was a gondola that went up about half a mile called Sky Tram. This was reminiscent of the ride I took last year through in Palm Springs for my birthday. Here are a couple of shots from Sky Tram:

The passing gondola

View from the top

After this, we made our way back down, and headed out to an internet cafe (where I am typing this blog note). Tomorrow we are off to the lighthouse at Battery point, and then off to Ashland, Oregon.

A couple of other pictures from Trees of Mystery

Taking advantage of light breaking through the trees

Pack rats -- they helped us back our car before leaving!

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