Snippets from the Brodies

Sunday, July 7, 2013

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.

Crater Lake National Park, Oregon - June 26th & 27th

From the Oregon Coast we headed inland a few hours to Crater Lake National Park, which we’d heard was incredible. It didn’t disappoint! The drive to the park was also beautiful, with lush green forests and a river winding its way alongside the road.

Crater Lake is an alpine lake which formed inside a crater when a massive volcano collapsed (they say about 9000 years ago) – it’s about 6 miles across at its widest, and the rock walls around it are super steep and rise up to 2000 feet above the water. The lake is the deepest in the

(7^th deepest in the world), at 1943 feet deep, and is also one of the bluest lakes (different to regular alpine lakes, with a deep dark blue colour).

The first thing we saw when we got into the park and to an overlook was a jaw-dropping view of the lake (of which photos REALLY don’t cut it – go and see for yourself!) – then we got distracted by a chipmunk (which we’d been trying to take photos of as we saw them sprinting around in the distance) trying to beg for food from people nearby… So we got a little excited about that, and may have dodgily given it some food… but it was SO cute!!

We’d arranged to meet up with our friend Shani, who lived near us in Wollongong for the first half of this year – but we somehow didn’t think about the fact that we wouldn’t have any phone reception in the National Park, and therefore couldn’t let Shani know where we’d be staying! So a little annoyed at ourselves, but seeing as there really wasn’t much we could do apart from wait and hope that she’d turn up here we happened to be, we left a message with the campground office, as to where we were staying the night and where we were heading now (back to the lake itself, to see the sunset).

So after a lovely sunset over the mountains, and freezing our fingers off at the lake (according to our car it was about 9°C, but that was definitely without the wind chill factor, which would have been pretty decent! We were contemplating digging out our snow gloves…). After the sun had well and truly disappeared, we headed back on the steep windy road to the campsite, and Shani and her mum Loretta were there waiting, having got the message at the campsite, which was great (but sorry for keeping you waiting!).

After introducing Loretta to vegemite the next morning, which was bright & sunny with clear skies, we headed back to the lake and then hiked a few kilometres up (small) mountain next to the lake – Garfield Peak, whose summit is 8054 feet (2455m) – the lake itself is at an altitude of about 6173 feet (1882m), so it wasn’t quite as big as it originally sounded! But we did notice the altitude a little bit (either that or sitting in the car for a couple of weeks has really made a difference…). Part of the hike up and down the mountain was on snow (in summer! Crater Lake is fed entirely by snowfall, averaging 533 inches a year! Which I worked out to be about 13m I think?) – so Lawrie and I had lots of fun launching ourselves back down part of the walk in the snow J

We also hiked down to the water’s edge, in the one spot where that’s possible – so the walk down was fantastic, the water beautiful (looking, that is, I’d rather not think about the temperature!) and the walk up not quite so great (steeeeep, and was getting a little too warm for tracksuit pants around then!)

It was a fantastic way to see the park, and we’d highly recommend going out of your way for it if you’re ever over the West Coast of the

! It was also great to catch up with Shani again, and to meet her Mum, and spend time with them both! (Sorry it wasn’t longer, and thanks so much for coming out to meet us there!)

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Oregon Coast - June 24th & 25th

From Olympia we took a while to get going, so decided to bypass most of Portland (the bigger city in Oregon, just below the Washington State border), as we’d still had enough of the city! So we drove through a few pretty confusing streets in the city (the GPS on my phone kept dropping out, and there are lots of one way streets!) but didn’t really have a look at much. But from what we saw and had heard of Portland, it’s a pretty alternate sort of city – lots of hippie types, and LOTS of bikes instead of cars (like a lot of places over here).

Another thing we noticed about Portland were the layers of freeways (although much smaller than the ones around Seattle) heading into the city, and the multi-level freeway bridges again.

Then we headed towards the Oregon coast, where we’d stay for the night. Much of what we noticed on the way was pretty similar to in Washington State, with lots of moist pine forests alongside the road, but there was also a lot of farmland that we didn’t see in Washington (but we were really only in the coastal areas of Washington).

Cannon Beach, the first town we got to on the coast, where we stayed for the night, was a cute little town where we took a little wander around and had a good look at Haystack Rock on the beach – was pretty impressive! It’s apparently the biggest freestanding coastal rock in the world, at about 235 feet tall. So that makes it 72 metres tall, just a tiny bit taller than the rock cliffs at the Great Ocean Road, and the 12 Apostles there.

We saw a little deer along the side of the road when driving through town, and we tried the famous Clam Chowder at Mo’s Restaurant, a seafood chain on the Oregon Coast, then back to the RV park for the night. We also took a photo of a massive American ‘truck’ (pick up) compared to an Aussie sized ute – quite a difference! And there are SO many big ‘trucks’ over here!

The next day we didn’t have quite so nice or even just overcast) weather – most of the day was spent in pouring rain, or thick fog so that we couldn’t see much of the coast at all! It was probably quite impressive, but we didn’t find out for too much of it… We did see some impressive parts though, and also some more squirrels, up much closer than before, which was pretty exciting! And we also saw elk along the road side (a fair distance away for the males, but still!), which was way exciting!