Tag Archives: Redwood National Park

Keep Your Friends Close, Your Anemones Even Closer

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Giant green anemone in a tidepool at Redwood National Park in California

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.

Nibbler

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A black-tailed deer doe eats leaves from a blackberry vine in a meadow in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

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.

Skunked and Not Skunked

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A skunk cabbage blossoms in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

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.

A skunk cabbage blossoms in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

Big Trees, Big Lens, & Sam the Snowman

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A black-tailed fawn eats leaves from a blackberry vine in a meadow in Prairie Creek Redwood State Park

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.

Face of a black-tailed deer fawn

We Three Kings

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Three large redwood trees grow close together in Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park

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.