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.

One thing I hadn’t remembered from my previous visit to the redwoods were the magnificent ferns that filled the forest floor underneath the towering trees, the forest feeling at once magnificent and ancient and certainly unlike the forests of the east that I wandered in my youth. I have never been a big lover of ferns, but I came away so impressed that I wanted to come home and create my own floor of ferns in the backyard.

While I did resist that urge, when I found a scraggly fern late in the winter hidden down in one of our wildflower gardens, I cleared out an area around this hardy survivor and hope it will grow and remind me of this spiritual place.

Redwoods have a shallow root system and fall over more than you might think, such as this tree that fell off the Hatton-Hiouchi trail. I visited early enough in the spring that winter blowdown still blocked some of the trails, fallen giants that weren’t so easily bypassed as the trees of my youth. When one tree blocked the Prairie Creek Trail I had to climb up the debris field to get across the trunk whose diameter greatly exceeded my height.

I had an easier time of it further on where a tree lay beside the trail and only its branches blocked the path. As I carefully made my way through, a trickster unseen grabbed my right ankle and sent me tumbling.

Even when I stumble, I have a pretty good sense of balance and so rarely fall when hiking. But not this time, the grip on my ankle was too strong and unexpected and I fell face first. Miraculously I stopped just above the ground, suspended in mid-air, and in that moment of confusion my mind went straight to divine intervention. But my guardian angel and trickster demon were one, for one branch had tripped me while another held me aloft.

God helps those who help themselves, so I felt for the ground with my feet and then eased my weight off the branch, collected my wits, and continued down the trail.

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.

On my journey to the redwoods, I expected to work mostly with the widest angles of my lens, highlighting the immense size and height of these ancient trees. However, my plans changed instantly the moment I stepped on the trails. I was struck both by the myriad colors and textures of the trees as well as their tenacity in hanging onto life despite fire and storm damage. This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip and also one of my earliest, I stopped off for a quick hike around the Simpson-Reed Trail in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park before continuing on to my hotel in Crescent City.

The bark of this redwood was colored green by moss, while on the right of the picture where the bark has been stripped away, you can see the red pulp that gives the redwoods their name.

A little experiment with form and color using a young elk bull in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in northern California.

I was pretty excited on this morning, it’s not every day that I get to discover alien life right here on our own planet! As soon as I saw this sea star, it was so much larger than the other stars, with so many more legs, that I knew it was from out of this world.

I set my tripod into the soft sand but I could hear a voice in my head telling me not to take the picture. I picked up my tripod and began to walk away before I rejected the star’s mind control and reset the tripod onto the wet beach. Sadly, when I got back home from my trip to Redwood National Park, I discovered that this is not a newly discovered star from the stars, but rather an already discovered terrestrial variety with latent Jedi powers.

Like the ochre sea star, the sunflower sea star also comes in shades of red, orange, and the purple seen here. With a few of the legs upturned, you can see the tube feet that let the stars grip the rocks on the beach, move about the tide pool, and grip their prey. At the time I thought it was sitting still, but looking at the pictures when I got home I could see it was slowly moving its legs.

I’m lucky I escaped with my life.

This patch of barnacles reminded me of a group of whales breaching the surface. There are real whales just offshore in the Pacific, but these mini-whales live their lives in the tide pools of Redwood National Park.

When researching my trip to Redwood National and State Parks, I expected to find redwoods (because I’m just that clever!) but I was surprised to see that the park included coastal areas as well. On the last morning of my trip, I visited the tidepools before starting up the coast towards my home in Oregon.

There are a couple of species of anemones in the tidepools of the Northwest, this is a giant green anemone. I’m a little disappointed in the name, while they are a lot larger than aggregating anemones, any creature you see in the ocean with a name that starts with “giant green” ought to be a huge monstrosity that emerges from the depths to wreak havoc and destruction along the coast.

Deer lack upper canine teeth but compensate by pinching vegetation against a calloused part of their mouth. This doe was eating the leaves of the blackberry bush by pressing the leaves to the roof of her mouth with her tongue and then pulling them off. She and her little ones were ignoring the other plants of the meadow and exclusively feeding on the blackberry leaves.

I went to more trouble than anyone in the history of the world has ever gone to photograph skunk cabbage.

I love the look of skunk cabbage but I’m also thankful I have such a poor sense of smell — they don’t come by their name by accident. There is a small patch along the Oaks-to-Wetlands Trail at Ridgefield but it’s a bit overrun and despite my best efforts I’ve never been able to get a decent picture.

While hiking in the redwoods, I came across a couple of small patches of skunk cabbage when the trail approached a large meadow. One flower in particular caught my fancy and I knew I had my chance to finally get a decent picture. I took some pictures with the lenses I had with me but since the flower was away from the trail, I wanted to return the next day with the big lens.

After hiking throughout the following morning and into the afternooon, I had a short window to revisit the cabbage before heading down to hike to a small waterfall. The cabbage turned out to be near a trailhead so I took the short route up. But each turn of the bend revealed no cabbage, the patch farther away in reality than memory.

I nearly turned back with each disappointing bend in the trail, worried I wouldn’t have enough time for the next hike. With the heavy lens and the bright sun and the light breeze I wasn’t sure the cabbage would be worth the effort anyway, nevermind the nagging suspicion that there would be a lot of cabbage near the stream from the waterfall that would be better subjects than these.

I did continue on and find the particular patch and the particular flower I was looking for. The leaves had shifted so it made an even more compelling scene than my previous visit and the forest canopy kindly shaded my chosen flower. To top it off, even more of the flower was in bloom. The breeze was moving the plants around so I waited for those brief seconds when all was still.

As it turns out there was a bunch of skunk cabbage on the trail to the waterfall, sitting right beside the trail with no big lens required, but I never found another that was as photogenic as this one. To be honest part of me didn’t want to find one, after going to the trouble to photograph the other, but I looked just the same.

That might not sound like I went to a lot of trouble, and in truth I didn’t, but I’d wager it’s still more trouble than anyone has ever gone to photograph skunk cabbage.

And I’m glad I did.

When packing for my trip to the redwoods, I went back and forth on whether I should bring my big telephoto lens. It’s so large and heavy that I wasn’t planning on hiking with it and didn’t expect to have much use for it among the big trees in any event. But with the hope of seeing harbor seals on the coast, I packed it alongside the rest of my camera gear.

A fortuitous decision but not because of harbor seals — I did see seals but not in good light. No, it was the meadows in the southern half of Redwood National Park that caught my fancy with the big glass, several families of black-tailed deer grazed one meadow and a herd of elk another.

Near sunset on my first full day in the park, a family of blacktails browsed on the blackberry vines that grew sporadically amongst the tall grasses of the meadow. I pointed the big lens at one fawn and was particularly delighted to see who was staring back at me: Sam the Snowman, the narrator from the Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer Christmas special I watched many times as a child.

Three giants growing close together, redwoods all with the two closest colored green by moss. All trip long I enjoyed studying the old trees up close due to the wonderful character of their bark.

These three kings aren’t growing as close together as the picture suggests, I used the telephoto end of the zoom to compress the scene. I took this picture in my first few minutes in the park and wanted to retake it to get more sharpness in the furthest tree, but I had so much fun in other parts of the park that I never was able to get back before it was time to head for home.

I was a little concerned when visiting the redwoods since I didn’t have a wide-angle lens for shooting the tall trees, but with layoffs looming I wasn’t about to spring for a full-frame camera or wide-angle digicam. There were definite times I wanted a wider lens, but I spent most of my time either shooting with my telephoto lenses or at the long end of my wide-angle zoom.

My wife and I had visited the redwoods on a day trip a decade ago and I was struck by the tall trees in the fog. I didn’t get much of the fog I hoped for on this trip but I had no shortage of subjects to photograph. The biggest surprise to me was the mesmerizing colors, shapes, and textures of the redwood trees and I spent more time zoomed in for intimate portraits of their bark than zoomed out for pictures of their girth.

I first got interested in shooting little landscapes like these in Yellowstone years ago, and this shot of the bark of an ancient redwood reminds me of my favorite spot in Mammoth Hot Springs.

This year’s version of Where’s Boolie comes courtesy of a large redwood tree in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park. This was my first morning in the park and the tree sits right off the Prairie Creek Trail with a cavity in the middle suitable for housing an entire bigfoot family.

I had to smile when I heard a distant hooting that morning, probably an unfamiliar owl or other bird, but it also reminded me of the supposed bigfoot calls from I show I watched a while back. I hoped with camera in hand to get some nice high-resolution, in focus, non-shaky bigfoot pictures but it was not to be. It would have been the perfect time to prove my theory on the true nature of bigfoot.

It is not a popular theory and has put me on the fringe of the lunatic fringe. I believe that they are not some form of ape running undiscovered in our forests — I mean seriously — but that they are in fact Wookiees.

My critics are quick to point out that Star Wars is fictional. I know it’s fictional — I’m not an idiot. I just don’t understand how it’s relevant. To Kill a Mockingbird is fictional. Are mockingbirds fictional too?

The land down under Oregon that is. Not the land where women glow and men plunder.

We were shutdown at work last week and I turned the unplanned vacation to my advantage and headed south to Redwood National and State Parks for a few days. My wife and I visited for a day on our honeymoon ten years ago but I hadn’t been back since. I tried to go a few years back but was halted by a nasty snowstorm followed by a nasty ice storm.

My original plans were to visit from Wednesday to Saturday, but I enjoyed myself so much that I extended the trip by a day. Sunday I meandered up the Oregon coast to Newport before finally crossing over to the higher speeds of I-5 and arrived home Sunday night to an enthusiastic welcome from the home crowd.

It was a splendid little trip and I came home relaxed and refreshed, hiking from sunrise to sunset in the forests of giants, watching deer and elk browse and play in the meadows, gingerly walking among the little creatures of the tidepools, watching harbor seals in the heavy surf.

These treehugger pictures were taken just before sunset on my last full day in the redwoods. It was pouring rain and I didn’t want to stop, but when a passing bigfoot offered to hold the camera I couldn’t resist. I wanted to retake the pictures in the morning since I made some mistakes but was cursed with a beautiful sunny day and the wrong light for what I wanted.

I had the camera set to ISO1600 (a fast speed) and yet the pictures still took 6 and 8 seconds. I was using a polarizer which didn’t help matters, but unfortunately it was so dark through the viewfinder that I didn’t get it turned just right to completely remove the reflections in the ferns. To make matters worse, my favorite pose is the top picture but by that time the rain had splattered the front of the lens but I didn’t realize it until it was too late.

Nevertheless, a fun end to a fun trip. I took a ton of pictures (I know, you’re surprised, right?) so look for the those in the coming weeks.