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.
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.
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.
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.