So this week I am on the road exploring Northern California and San Francisco. Yesterday I spent time in the Redwood State Park around Orick California.
If you’ve been to the Redwoods you know how awe inspiring they are. If you haven’t been there let me just say that these are the biggest trees you will ever see. They are just ginormous (ginormous is a word right?)
I drove along the Newton B Drury Scenic parkway through stands of 350 foot tall redwoods. I hiked on a few trails through these magnificent groves of trees, gazed in awe at the Big Tree (it is 341 feet tall and 21 feet in diameter) near Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.
Unfortunately I don’t have any photos to share right now as while I am lucky to have Internet access the laptop I have with me is incapable hardware-wise of opening Lightroom and the large files from the Canon 5DII. I suppose this is more justification to upgrade to a new laptop.
I hope to post photos from this adventure in a few days. Project 365 is still going strong and I will post updates for that as soon as I can.
Until then keep moving forward to great things.
Glad to hear you made it to Redwood National Park Matt! The grandeur of the redwoods really is beyond description. You just have to spend time with them to appreciate how amazing they really are. I recently finished a book called “The Wild Trees” by Richard Preston (an NYT Best Seller) about Steven Stillet and Michael Taylor and their quest to find the tallest redwood in northern California. They describe their discovery of “The Grove of Titans” in Jedediah Smith State Park and an amazing redwood they called Hyperion. Stillet and some fellow climbing cohorts scaled many of these redwoods using climbing techniques they perfected over the years including spider ropes to go sideways as well as up and down. There’s a whole different world up in the redwood canopy flourishing with all sorts of life both plant and animal; a world we can’t begin to appreciate from the ground. These guys spent many a night sleeping up in the top of the redwood canopy. I highly recommend the book for a good read. Stillet, a professor at Humboldt State University, gave a talk in Eugene last year. It was excellent. He was also pictured in the recent National Geographic Magazine article on the redwoods.
And then there’s Julia “Butterfly” Hill who spent 738 straight days without descending, living in the top of a 170′ redwood called Luna to prevent it from being logged. She was successful. She also spoke in Eugene several years ago at the Environmental Law Conference.
I look forward to your photographs of these giants!