Our Visit to the Moon of Endor – Land of the Ewoks

Well, can’t actually say that we saw any Ewoks (THAT would be an epic wildlife sighting) but we did see the forests where the Return of the Jedi was filmed for the scenes featuring the Ewoks. Heck, next to these tall trees, WE looked about the size of an Ewok! (No, not just Dawn’s height or Dean’s beard…you know you thought it.) We just wished we had a couple of those flying motorcycle thingies to zip around the forest.

Redwood National Park is the most disjointed of the National Parks we’ve seen. It shares the management and administration of the park with a couple of California State Parks. The Park lands are somewhat scattered along the coast with a chunk of park property here, and another there, with small towns and private property laced through it. But while this makes finding your way around a little less convenient, it is no less enjoyable for the ginormous tall trees the park is primarily intended to protect/preserve. Situated in the northwest corner of California, just below Oregon, Redwood NP gets the coastal temperate weather patterns, which means cool high temps and not-too-cold low temps, and not much swing between the two on most days. Apparently, this along with frequent rain and almost-daily fog (which usually burns off by about noon) makes for ideal growing conditions for the tallest trees in the world. We did not get rained on, but we saw a heckuva lot of fog!

Redwoods are tall even when lying on their side!

The Redwoods and the Sequoia’s are cousins; the Sequoia’s evolved fat genes with a girth of 30 plus feet while the Redwoods evolved to tower over the canopy of other trees, sometimes competing against each other in groves for sunlight, sending them even taller. Their girth usually tops out at about ___ , which is still huge. Many redwoods end up competing with their own offspring as they tower over 300 feet, with some clearing 350 feet! The tallest tree in the world is in the park, but its location is kept secret to prevent damage/erosion from visitation to the area around the tree. Unlike the Sequoia’s which need fire to open their cones and release the seeds (which look like little flakes of oatmeal) the Redwoods rarely grow from seeds. It’s probably a good thing – the cones are about the size of a black olive. Instead, the Redwoods grow burls near the base of the tree. When a tree is threatened by injury or fire, it sends off a shoot from the burl, thus starting a new tree. Redwoods are also younger; about 79% of Redwoods are between the ages of 200-700 years. Of the remaining, only a handful are older than 1000 years.

A Redwood Cone. Tallest tree with tiniest cone.

We took advantage of several hiking trails to get up close and personal with these coastal behemoths. The Stout Tree Loop (the trees were stout…but the trail is named after Frank Stout, (after his wife Clara donated the land) and the Tall Trees Trail (not so-designated for a benefactor called Tall…it’s just an appropriate if unimaginative name) were two of the highlights; Boy Scout Tree was fun to hike to and the interpretative trail at Lady Bird Johnson Grove had a lot of good info. Stout and Tall Trees are easy must-do hikes. We did a bit longer hike on the James Irvine Trail to Fern Canyon (yep, named for the ferns that carpet the walls of a small narrow canyon), returning on the Miners Ridge Trail to make it a loop. This trail was much closer to the coast, in fact, the halfway point where we consumed our 40th YOFO PBnJ was on the beach.

Even if the fog didn’t lift very much for us, hiking through the tallest trees on earth and seeing diffuse sunlight through the leaf canopy and fog/clouds made every hike special. Pictures can’t do the lighting justice, but there’s something special about it for sure. We also had a few new wildlife sightings – seals barking, banana slugs eating, and a newt hanging out on the trail. There’s also a subspecies of elk in the park, the Roosevelt Elk, that apparently is aggressive, but we just saw them hanging out peacefully munching grasses.

This is as far north as we’ll get for a while. Our YOFOadventures are heading south where the climate promises more sun, warmth, and less snow. First, however, we intend to stop to sample (and stock up) some California wine. We may be going feral, but we still enjoy fine (and even not-so-fine) wine!