While I loved the largest of the trees and never tired of seeing them, I suppose some of my favorite redwood scenes were of the mixed-age forests. Old veterans scarred black with fire, hollowed out even but still standing, damaged by winter storms through the centuries. Beside them healthy young trees or spindly saplings, some from the logs of fallen trees, a variety of shapes and colors and textures between them.
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Oberon in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
An unexpected delight from my visit to the redwoods was finding trillium all across the park, little jewels blooming beneath the giants. Our western trillium blooms white early in the spring and turns purple as it ages, like the flower in the bard’s tale.
Everywhere I go, animals are overjoyed to see me. I can’t believe it’s been a year since I was in the redwoods, can’t wait to get down there again.
We didn’t have ground squirrels where I grew up in the east, so when we moved west I was delighted to find them, such as this one near the auto tour at Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge in California. While I enjoyed my visit to the refuge back in 2003, I had to cancel the rest of my trip as an unexpected snowstorm trapped me in Redding for a couple of days, then I just made it home to Portland before an ice storm trapped me there.
California ground squirrels are also native to Oregon, and in fact there are some that live on the campus where I work, but unfortunately I rarely get to see them in the places that I hike the most.
Like a flower opening its petals to greet the sun, this anemone had its tentacles unfurled at sunrise to greet not the sun but the ocean. There is a chiton to the upper left of the anemone that I hadn’t noticed until I got home and looked at the pictures.