California’s Coastal Redwoods

Down the coast to the coastal redwoods in CA.  We stopped by this privately run redwoods park because it had been advertising its ski lift through the tree tops for the last 50 miles.

The famous anatomically correct Babe the blue ox.  Paul Bunion had a speaker somewhere and a guy hidden in the building with cameras to talk to visitors, the hand waves a few degrees.

These foxgloves outside were planted but this is what was growing thick up and down all the highways wild in Washington

This place had been featured in the old Ripleys Believe it or Not show, and had lots of audio excerpts from the show scattered throughout   This grouping of trees is like an alter, they hold weddings here.

Inside the gondola going to the top of a mountain through the trees.

Hard to see in this pic, this tree had several other trunks going straight up at right angles from the lower limbs,  it had loads of ferns and other plants growing up there like a whole little eco system in the sky.

Root ball from a old fallen redwood.  Redwoods have something in the wood that prevents decay and insects, this is a good example.  Ontop of this enormous fallen tree was a few other giant redwoods that had grown over it, they estimate the tree fell 3000 years ago based on the ones growing on top of it.  Roots are pretty well preserved for 3000 years sitting out exposed to the elements.

Lightning bolt tree

Brother hood tree sequioa

Shot of the leaves from above on the gondola, I like how the edges with the new leaves are all a lighter color

Hard to see, all that whiteness is ocean.

This site was not part of the national forests or parks and had been used for commercial logging 100 years ago.  A few of the trees were cut half way through and then left and still standing.  Others were like this, ever cut down an elm and get all the suckers growing out of the trunk?  Heres the redwood version, these things are increadibly resilient.

No idea what these were, they were everywhere there was patches of light.

Candelabra tree,  one had fallen over and now grew up 7 trunks from the fallen one in mid air.

Someone had carved lots of sculputers in on piece from the huge trees, stuff like this was interspersed along the walkways.  They had carved murals telling the stories of several folk tales