November 19,2013 Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California

Heavy rain and fog again today. High in the 50’s. What better place to go than in the redwoods, you can’t see the sky anyway.

The bus at Chinook RV resort at Klamath, California. We have a river side spot, next to the Klamath river. Nice resort. Our view of the river includes the riverside deck with big fire place on it. The chinook salmon and the steelhead trout spawn up the Klamath river. People come here to fish for them.

Klamath is part of the Yurok Indian reservation. Also here is the Tour Thru Tree.  We paid $5 to drive through the tree. The tree is approximately 785 years old and had a fire scarred hole in the base.  Because of it’s giant size it was spared when the area was logged in 1967. There was also a small picnic area with this thin slice of redwood with dates highlighted on the rings. The center on is 1375. The picnic area has a one of a kind modern restroom made in a section of an 8 foot diameter redwood.

Off to the park in the thick fog. At the visitors center was this Yurok redwood canoe. The Indians kept them wet and shaded to keep them from drying out. 

Elk along the road. The redwoods on the Lost Mine trail.

The trail is an old logging road. They logged farther up the road. In 1918 a group concerned about the redwoods formed the Save the Redwood society, raised money and bought most of the old growth groves left in this area and donated it to the park service. It is now the largest grove of old growth redwoods in the world. The society had these $10,000 trips to the redwoods for the wealthy to see the trees and donate the $10,000 to the fund.  Many of the groves are named after donors. The creek bottom has alder trees with some leaves still and some mossy maples that have lost their leaves.

These trees are the tallest in the world. The tallest is 378 feet tall. It is impossible to take photos of these trees, they are just too big.

The Lost Mine road trail. John is a tiny dot on the trail.

They named the trees Sequoias after the Cherokee leader Sequoia. I have seen a few redwood carvings of Sequoia and they looked kind of like the burl on this tree.  John on the Cathedral trail. It gets dark early in these groves, so it was too dark to take photos of the huge trees.

Mushrooms seen on the dead redwood logs.