nawl

By nightfall, we had reached Humboldt county and took the Avenue of the Giants, where I amused myself by taking blurry pictures of trees. It's a kind of neat effect. Outside of clearly defined park areas, things were pretty flat and meadowy. Tobin actually commented that he had expected there to be more trees in the area. I'm afraid to wonder how much of it was originally forest.

The first night we stayed with Tobin's friend Bryce, who had all sorts of beautiful pictures he had taken on his walls. He gave us directions to some interesting places to visit. Around that point, the trip had begun to feel like the Splorg world tour.

The next day, the weather was pretty gray. We stopped by a beach to take contemplative pictures of bird tracks in sand.

Then we drove into the forest. Along the way, there were several elk viewing points where we saw lots of elk just hanging out. There were signs everywhere that said "Danger: wild elk. Do not approach on foot.".

The road to Fern Canyon was unpaved and bumpy through some amazing forest. We passed clean-cut tree stumps covered in moss that were four, five, six feet wide and I felt a real shiver of empathy for such ancient trees. There really is something about this forest, the sort of thing that inspires young people to live in such trees to keep them from being cut down.

The road was closed off where a stream had decided to adopt it as its riverbed, so we walked an extra mile or two to the start of the Fern Canyon trail, right past some elk grazing at the roadside. Fern Canyon is pretty much what its name suggests.

The trail along the canyon floor consisted pretty much of branches suggesting stream crossings. The stream wasn't more than a few inches deep, but we both got our feet wet. And then Tobin fell in. Poor thing. He survived, though, and didn't even complain about the cold.

A bit past the big fallen tree, lovely overgrown stairs took us up to the top of the canyon.

A requisite "this is a really big tree" picture:

The forest really does look primeval. You can almost imagine dinosaurs tramping along among the ferns. Add a light rain fading into mist, some scattered thunderclaps, and complete silence otherwise. I stopped once to listen. There was nothing. Even the ocean was inaudible. We saw a handful of people on the main road on their way out while we were walking in, but once in the forest, as far as we could tell, we were entirely alone.

We made it back to the van just before it got dark.

That night, we drove into Jedediah Smith state park and turned onto a random road marked "day use only" to find a place to sleep that night. I was paranoid that the rangers were out to get us, but my freak-outs were for naught. The lights I saw were flashes of lightning that turned into a full-on thunderstorm in the middle of the night.

In the morning, we saw that we had parked near a wide river. Our spot must have been a popular camping spot. Trash was everywhere. So we cleaned up and drove on.

Tobin wanted to visit the upper left corner of California, so we drove into Oregon for five minutes. A lady at the tourist office in Crescent City (I think...) told us the nearby Stout Grove had some nice trees, so we went off to explore there. The undergrowth seemed a bit more under control than the previous day's forest, and there were plenty of tourists wandering around the nice wide paths. Another "really big tree" picture...

...some surprising flowers...

We decided to prolong our trip and drive into Oregon. What a funny state. Gas station attendants are required by law to pump your gas for you, there's no sales tax, drivers are required to stay in the right-hand lane unless they're passing, and (apparently this is only a southern Oregon thing) we saw weird isolationist/heavy duty Christian propaganda everywhere (signs on people's fields: "Get the US out of the UN!" "No $$ for USrael", a video store called CleanFlicks in Grants Pass that offers to edit your videos of "objectionable content", etc.). We walked into a Walgreens and asked if they had any maps "like of Oregon". The employees looked rather bewildered and suggested we try the magazine racks. (One was found later at a Rite-Aid.)

We visited the Oregon Caves, which you tour on a concrete path that was blasted out in the 30s.

I figured that since we were in Oregon, I should at least try to look up where Josh lives and see if it was feasible to visit. We detoured to Medford and spent a significant part of the evening trying to find anywhere that had internet access, which was a large failure. The only Kinko's in town closed at midnight.

Cooked that night's dinner over a camping stove in the parking lot of a drive-through bank, and found a place to sleep off a road that promised to go to a waterfall. In the morning, we woke up and ate breakfast on a rock perch overlooking the waterfall. Mills Creek waterfall, for future reference.

Then we drove to Crater Lake. Josh gave me his opinion later:

josh: you can't do anything at crater lake..
josh: besides look at it
josh: it's just a really big hole
josh: which describes oregon pretty well

It is, in fact, a big hole.

There wasn't much to do, so I took pictures of the funny winter lake-viewing tube. The graffiti inside included the usual pick-up lines, some vegan propaganda, and "death to Canada". The bathrooms also had funny entrance tunnels.

There was an awful lot of snow for summer. I've never walked around in snow in sandals and shorts before.

Then we couldn't find anything else to do, so we left and drove back to California. Shasta is pretty.

Spent the night near Redding. There's not a lot up there. We were lost for a while in a maze of anonymous strip malls, and then drove way up into the hills (past the Whiskeytown recreation area, which seemed much too popular to be an effective sleeping place) and found a stopping place down the road from a fish hatchery, which we toured in the morning. They left all the doors and gates open so we could wander.

We thought this might be an appropriate sign for a coop:

And the little fish tanks looked like something out of the X-Files.

The truck in this picture is spraying food onto the water. When it drives by, the water foams with fish jumping to get food.

Home was straight down I-5. A few hours of it were enough, so we detoured onto a parallel smaller road and drove through farmlands in the stifling heat. Not many people were out, but we saw huge crowds of cars at a church and at a casino. Apparently the places to be on a Sunday morning. Little gravel roads pulled away from the highway every once in a while through orchards to the edgs of the Sacramento river. I voted that it was too muddy and gross to swim.
Back to the highway it was, then, and home.