2015 Road Trip: Part 33 (Redwoods)

Redwoods State Park, CA
Day 48-49
5.31.15 - 6.1.15

I made progress south from Crate Lake NP to a small free campsite near the small town of Kerby, OR.  Because it was free, there wasn't too much maintenance and cleanup happening, but the good part about this is that I was able to find a semi-broken green folding chair.  I fixed it up with duct tape.  It also has built in speakers which sort of work if you plug in an iPod or something.  I can't imagine how many rainstorms it has endured.  Due to impending thunderstorms, I wanted to keep the picnic table dry, so up went a somewhat elaborate shelter.

After getting dinner all sorted away, I had to do some rearranging of the car because tomorrow I was going to continue my journey east with Emma, who was working on a farm in southwest Oregon.  (For those who don't know, Emma worked on the Baxter SP trail crew with me last fall.)

I went into town to catch up on some online things, and I got caught in this crazy hailstorm that dropped lots of loud pea-sized hail.  I was happy to be in a car, but it was very noisy.  It wasn't large enough to cause damage luckily.  But it covered the ground and looked very strange to someone who hasn't seen much hail before.

The total route map of the day from Mt. Thielsen to Kerby, OR is below. To date, the total miles driven is 9232.  (If you're checking my math along the way, you will realize this is above all the route maps combined. This is because I didn't bother to give maps for my wandering around the Eugene area for a few days.)

Day 48: 184 miles.

In the morning, I got up to no thunderstorms, so that was nice.  I picked up Emma and we continued south to check out the Redwoods of northern California.  As is usual, the rain began soon.  It gave an interesting mood, but it was not conducive to looking out along the Pacific coast.

There are several parks, state and national, that make up the Redwood area.  We went to Redwoods State Park if I'm not mistaken.  There was a trail called Trillium Falls Trail that was not too long and was supposed to bring us through some nice groves of tall trees.  And tall they were.

Redwoods are very wide.

I felt very small walking among the trees.  It's a cool feeling compared to trees in Maine.

Along the way, we found a friendly salamander.  I'm not sure if it was enjoying the attention, but it got some from us.

Wouldn't you befriend him?

Here is an example of a fallen redwood with me for scale.

Oregon has cool bridges along US-101.  Since it was cloudy and the coast was not really visible, we paid attention to the bridges instead.

This car was REALLY low in the back, but not in the front.
It looked ridiculous.

The distances were working out perfectly if we went back to the campsite I had just outside of Eugene again.  It's a bit inland, but it is tricky to find any good (read "cheap/free") places to camp on the coast if you're not a hiker or biker, so I felt better going to a place I knew existed.

Aside from it being wet and slightly raining, the campsite was nice to return to, especially since we got the same spot I had stayed at before.

Day 49: 404 miles.

Total miles traveled on the trip is 9636.