entirely safe and fun

Bigtree is biiiiiiiiiig!

This past weekend, Punam and I, along with my old friend Noah, travelled up to Humboldt County (far northern California) to spend a little time with some really big trees. The old-growth Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) forest is like something out of a science-fiction novel, silent, dark and wet, with trees as straight as carved columns towering over 300 feet in the air, and nary a branch below a hundred feet. One tree that large would be remarkable, but the forests of that region boast of a thick myriad of them, trees forty feet in girth, just forty feet apart, for mile upon mile along the Eel River and its tributaries — a gobsmacking accumulation of Ur-old giants.

We drove up on Friday night, and then spent Saturday driving the Avenue of the Giants, stopping at some of the touristy destinations along the way and taking a short hike at the Founders’ Grove. By preference, we went to Fortuna for tuna, as well as to eat at the fantastic Eel River Brewing Company. Overnight, we stayed in the Redcrest Resort, which I can heartily recommend to other travelers, and then on Sunday we had a light picnic, and a pleasant hike in the Rockefeller Forest. My previous trip into the Rockefeller was in high summer, and I can say without reservation that the wet season is a better time to go — it was practically empty, and there were no equestrians on the dual-use trail (and thus no boot-fouling equestrian by-products).

We topped this all off with a world-class dinner at the Underwood in Graton, near Santa Rosa. Our friends Sebastian (a local and a foodie) and Rebecca led us there, and I had what, on reflection, was one of the best matches of desire and fulfillment I’ve ever had at a restaurant. They had a find selection of oysters on the half-shell, two dozen items on the menu that I regret not ordering, a moderately sized but remarkably concentrated wine list, and local spirits on the dessert menu, including a Davis Family calvados-style apple brandy with a perfect match of fire, fruit, and oak that far surpassed any European offering I’ve yet encountered.

Below, I’ve picked out a few highlights from the pictures I took on the trip. More are available in my Flickr set here. Seriously, you need to check these out, especially the vertical panorama of an exceptionally mighty redwood.

The drive-through tree in Myers Flat, CA. Pretty impressive, but a little sad, like a mangy circus tiger. The tree is nearly dead from the event that burned it out and took off its top, kept propped up now with some cables.

A treehouse, carved into a stump, in Myers Flat (which is Where It’s At!). Noah and Punam are on the second floor!

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I am about six feet tall. This is a really, really large ball of roots.

The orchid-like lily Scoliopus bigelovii, as previously blogged here, in a better close-up picture.

Redwoods are so tall that they effectively live in more than one climatic zone, and thus have more than one distinct kind of foliage. On the left, broad leaves optimized for absorbing water from fog and for photosynthesizing in the shade of their higher neighbors; on the right, a scaly leaf from the canopy, designed to minimize water loss while still presenting photosynthetic surface area.

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Noah at the base of a mighty Sequoia sempervirens, Rockefeller Forest. I wasn’t able to pace off enough distance from its base for a really accurate estimate, but the first branch on this tree is certainly more than 120 feet high. The tree as a whole is likely over 300 feet tall, and there are several just as large within fifty feet of it. It’s about twelve feet in diameter at the base. No picture can communicate the awesomeness of the primary-growth redwood forests, but I keep trying.

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I can’t resist at least one trick panorama. Punam and Noah are checking out this fallen giant with a beautiful pattern of grain, and marvelling at the canopy, a hundred feet overhead, in the Rockefeller Forest.

This is the sort of thing you learn as a Boy Scout. Cool, no? (By the way, this image, along with all the others here, is CC by-sa licensed, and so marked on Flickr.)