Redwood National Park - June 28th

After Crater Lake we headed back towards the coast, via some reasonably windy downhill roads, where we discovered that the brakes on our van aren’t too wonderful – looking at getting that fixed soon…

And the weather changed pretty dramatically! From wearing trackies and jackets at Crater Lake and being slightly warm in the sun, to the temperature suddenly sky-rocketing and hitting about 35°C where we were staying for the night! And it was summer at last J

From where we stayed that night at Grant’s Pass, Oregon, feeling rather dwarfed by the massive RVs surrounding us, we headed to the top of the California coast, and the Redwoods National Park. This is a bit of a different style to the other national parks, in that it’s made up of a few separate state parks, and it’s not so much a stop and look at everything park as a drive through and appreciate it one (well it was for us anyway!). The highway that goes through the park swaps between scenic drives through the forests, highway travel, and lookouts/outlooks over the coastline.

Our van compared to an enormous (normal!) RV...

The Californian Redwoods are some of the biggest trees on the earth, as well as the oldest – up to 2000 years old, with the average age being 500-700 years. One of the trees we saw had a sign saying that it was estimated at 1500 years old, and was 92.6m (304 feet) tall, with a diameter of 6.6m (21.6 feet) and circumference of 20.7m (68 feet).

The redwood is famous for being the tallest tree on the earth, while the giant Sequoia tree is shorter but wider in diameter (there’s another National Park for these, but we can’t get to all of them!) – mind you these were still the widest trees I’d ever seen! Can’t really show the scale by photos but I tried…

The Redwood National Park also has some areas which are really well known for elk (ie. Elk Meadow and Elk Prairie), but we didn’t see any elk there – however just down the road from one of them there was a whole bunch on the wide of the road, so we pulled over pretty quick and excitedly took a bunch of photos.

The weather stayed absolutely beautiful for us, so the plan was to stay somewhere on the coast and drive most of the way to San Francisco the next day on the coast road – but the town we ended up (Eureka) in was very… interesting… and we decided to pass it up – thankfully we couldn’t find anywhere to stay the night there, so headed inland a little down the coast highway to a much nicer place where we camped for the night, Fortuna.