July 17, 2013 - Wednesday

Today we left the Eureka KOA after sleeping in and making breakfast. The Humboldt State Redwoods were not too far away from our campground, so we knew we wanted to make it a point to stop. These Redwoods were enormous compared to the Redwoods we saw in the Redwood National Park. As you can see from the pictures, we look like ants next to some of these trees. There is a lot of Redwood conservation going on now and trees that had been logged in the early 1900s have been replaced by little trees and are starting to grow again. Redwoods grow a couple feet a year. The roots don’t grow very well down in the ground but can spread laterally very far and can even intertwine and graft themselves with other Redwoods to almost make a super Redwood! Walking through the forest, we felt like little kids, or ants, who could easily get lost if we spent a little more time meandering. We learned a lot from a little pamphlet handed to us before we started our walk. We got to see a few gigantic trees along the way. Your average tree out here is probably about 8-10 feet in diameter.

We visited the visitor’s center and saw a couple more cool things. A man by the name of Charles Kellog built an enclosed truck bed out of part of a redwood tree. He drove around in this, sleeping and touring, for months to help spread the word on the importance of conservation. The truck is now housed in the visitor’s center.

After leaving, we stopped at only one tourist trap. There was a one log house that we wanted to tour. A man in the early 1900s took 8 months to carve out the center of a single redwood to make a 7’ wide x 32’ long house that he drove around with on a trailer bed. He had s little kitchen, two single beds and a living/dining area. It was pretty cool and pretty roomy for being the inside of a tree! We browsed the gift shop and got a latte to go. It was warmer here, but still only in the 70s with no humidity.

I drove for about 20 minutes and when Chris saw the look of the terrain on route 1 ahead, he decided to drive-good thinking. I would have been a nervous wreck driving Highway 1. Some of the pictures give you an idea of the type of road it is. 101 had roads close to cliffs. 1 was an entire road following close enough to the ocean you could smell it and guard rails were rare along Highway 1. The ocean was beautiful with tall, pointy rocks and towering cliffs above. It was cloudy most of the way south, but eventually the sun peeked through the fog and clouds. We got to our campground on the Mendocino coast around 7 and built a campfire, had steaks and baked beans for dinner, then went to sleep!