Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Avenue of The Giants: Ancient Redwoods!

Our home for a few days is Richardson Grove RV Park in Garberville, California. It's a nice older campground that has an affiliation with the Assemblies of God Churches.  We like the atmosphere, the price is reasonable and it's not crowded.

These days in northern California, the sunshine is warm but shady areas are downright cool and the occasional breeze is just plain cold so we keep a sweatshirt closeby.  The drive approaching this campground was nice and we started seeing some large redwood trees. 
It's obvious the road was carefully placed to show off the redwoods!


The campground entrance.  I could stay here a month easily.

This is our site.
Except for Saturday night, there were no neighbors on either side of us.
All these people around us left within two days.  

A famous Redwood is across the street from our campground. The Grandfather Tree attraction is closed for repair so we didn't get to see it.
It seems wood carving is really BIG around here.

So the Grandfather Tree is 1800 years old and stands 245 feet.
Too bad we didn't get to see the actual tree.
This area is the supposed "home" of legendary Bigfoot; first claimed to have been seen in the 1950's around Willow Creek... At one place along US 101 we did see a huge pile of poop that didn't look like it could have come from man or beast!  I'm just saying...  Maybe.
I really think this is a tourist trap roadside store but we stopped to take a look.  Purchases...none. But they had a big neon yellow "Shrek" I really liked -- $2500 would buy it. Wayne said "no" --
The Avenue of The Giants a 31 mile section of Old US 101 that emcompasses 51,222 acres of magnificent redwood trees.  The scenic route was built as a stagecoach and wagon road in the 1880s. It has most outstanding display of giant redwood trees in the entire 500 mile redwood belt. Humbolt Redwoods State Park's Rockefeller Forest is the largest contiguous old growth redwood forest in the world and is included. 

The Wayner

We drove about 45 miles north along the new portion of US 101 to the northern entry of the Avenue of the Giants and made our way south, traveling parallel to the Eel River and the new section of US 101 to the southern exit of the Avenue at Phillipsville.
Looking up into the tree tops.

I was a little bit afraid something alive might be in there!
Of particular interest to me was to see The Dyerville Giant.  This tree was measured in 1972 to be 362 feet tall, (200 feet taller than Niagara Falls or comparable to a 30-story building).  The Dyerville Giant has a circumference of 52+ feet!  It's crown spread was 74 feet and it weighs more than a loaded 747 jumbo jet -- 1,000,000 pounds!  Now here's the kick: The tree simply fell over on March 24, 1991 and is now in several pieces on the ground at Founder's Grove along the Avenue of the Giants.  We looked and looked for this giant fallen tree but can you believe ---? We never found it!  Go figure.

The forests of giant redwoods is breathtakingly beautiful.  The view is almost pre-historic.  Like at Yosemite, I felt very small standing among these huge surroundings.  But today's bright sunlight breaking through the trees onto the car's windshield was almost blinding -- like having your photo taken at night with a flashbulb.  It was hard to drive.
These trees are really big.

The sunshine coming straight down through the treetops make a flash of light onto the car's windshield.

Tomorrow we'll head farther north, stopping for a few days at Eureka.
The Eel River runs parallel to the scenic route through the Redwoods.

I just couldn't resist including this cute picture of Lexie in the little daisies.
This was taken at the campground.

1 comment:

  1. Nice Pics! I was there last summer and it was a blast. How did the motorhome fare on the curves? :)

    Did you get a chance to head up the Southern Oregon Coast? That is one of the most spectacular areas in my opinion, particularly until after the 3-capes scenic byway just after Newport.

    If you are looking for other great scenic routes, consider a stop on my site, http://www.myscenicdrives.com/ which has several on the western half of the US and I'm working on getting it across the US.

    ReplyDelete