Prairie Creek Redwoods

 

A neighbor and I made an impromptu visit to the redwoods today.  When we left home, I had in mind the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park about 30 minutes from home.  But as I drove, I picked up a wild hair to keep going south, so we did, all the way to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park south of Klamath, one of my favorite places.  Once in the park, we picked a random trail and walked back into the trees for quite awhile, joyous with the deep foresty scents and the sunrays slashing through the giant trees.

Not the greatest photo -- the darkness in the forest is a bit much for hand-held (and admittedly, sloppy operator) photography.  I include it here merely for proportion.  My friend is an average-sized person, and she is dwarfed by this tree, which is only one of many of similar size we encountered.

As usual, I got carried away with the sunrays, but they are so exquisite!

We were fortunate to have bright sunshine and only a little fog here and there once we arrived at the park.

It's been so long since I've been mushrooming that I passed these by at first, without even a hint of recognition.  A sure sign of fall in this part of the world is these golden beauties!  These two are Yellowfoot, I think, and we found some Chanterelles as well. Now I'm itching to go on a mushrooming expedition.

A few of them made it home with me and will be part of my dinner.

The trail we followed was spectacular, winding its way through groves of big trees and all that lovely fern undergrowth.

 After we returned to the car from the first trail, we continued on down the road to see "Big Tree".  Indeed, it's a very large redwood!  This photo of the base doesn't look much larger than other redwoods, but it's when you look up -- way up -- and see the massiveness of the trunk that you realize just how big it really is. If you look closely, you will see that the thick trunk stops abruptly, an indication that "Big Tree" was once much taller, but lost it's top to a lightning strike or some such many years ago.  Normally, they do taper towards the top.

Although much of the coast we drove past was foggy, our area has a high surf warning today and some unusually large waves which, when they could be seen, were truly magnificent.  That alone was a treat.  The redwoods were just the icing.  Chocolate icing, to be sure, but the surf was spectacular.  I wish I'd had a chance to photograph it, but alas....maybe tomorrow.