Big Basin State Park
Jul. 28th, 2007 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragoness_eLast weekend, July 21, I drove over the mountains to Big Basin State Park. The main road there is this narrow, winding, two-lane road through the mountains--and Saturday is apparently the day every cross-country biker in California decides to take his bicycle through the mountains. There were swarms of bicyclists pedaling up the mountain road, adding to the 'interesting' level of the drive. Not only did I have to pay close attention to the curves and oncoming traffic, I had to avoid running over bicyclists who were around just about every corner. It was definitely not a drive for zoning out and listening to music.
These mountains, the coastal mountains, are not the dry, sere brown hills of the eastern, inland mountains. They're like the Appalachians - covered with tall conifers and quite green. Just how tall those trees are, I was soon to find out.
On the way up the mountains, there's quite a bit of vineyard country--you pass roads leading to quite a few California wineries. There's also several towns that don't look like they've changed much in a hundred years, or have been restored to their historic look.
Big Basin State Park is the entire watershed of Wadell Creek, which is to say it is a river valley, all its tributaries, and the moutains surrounding them. Getting to the Park HQ is a bit of an adventure--the winding two-lane road turns into a one-lane road part of the way. It's still winding through the mountains, though the mountains are heavily forested by that point--with really big trees. Right next to the road.
One lane road.
Sometimes chunks of the road are missing
Fortunately, I wasn't driving that way. That particular road was on my walk. After the long, lonely drive to get to the park headquarters, I was surprised to find that there's a zillion people at the park.
Big Basin Park Headquarters
There's also a zillion Stellar's Jays nicking scraps
Apparently, everyone else knows to come in the much easier-to-drive southern entrance. That's the route I used to leave, on the advice of one of the park rangers. It was indeed a much easier drive. I've already mentioned the big trees--they come in two flavors: Douglas fir, and the Coastal Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) that the park was created in 1902 to preserve.
Right in the parking lot
So tall, it's hard to photograph the whole thing!
The redwoods are interesting trees in a interesting environment. The coastal mountains get a lot of fog and moisture from the sea, and the redwoods drink it up, and exhale a vast amount of water per tree. It's very humid in a redwood forest--like being back in southern Lousiana, only not so miserably hot, and always shady.
My first hike, after parking and re-packing my back pack with lunch and a change of shirt in case I got hot (I did, and changed to a sleeveless shirt), was down the short Redwoods Trail Loop. There I was lucky enough to fall in behind a guided group with a park ranger giving explanatory lectures, so I learned a lot of interesting things.
Redwood bark is very fire resistant--you see fire-scarred trees all over the place.
Like this one
However, the heartwood is not so fire-resistant, resulting in many of the old trees being partially hollowed out; fire burns out the dead heartwood, but doesn't burn the fire-resistant bark and sapwood, so the tree doesn't die. Over the years, the tree tries to grow over the holes.
Typical hollowed-out tree
Chimney Tree, Redwoods Trail
This tree is special because not only is it hollowed out, but the top broke off, and it's hollow all the way to the sky. The tree is quite green and otherwise healthy.
You can see sky!
Redwood trees reproduce in a number of interesting ways. New shoots will sprout from just about any piece of tree--stump, branches, fallen logs, and burls.
Burls are like weird cancers that can grow at the base of the tree
The 'Animal Tree', Redwoods Trail Loop
Burls are not only very prolific when it comes to re-sprouting trees, they also mill and polish up into very beautify cabinet wood. Another lovely cabinet wood is 'wavy wood', a rare mutation of the grain pattern in redwoods.
Wavy Wood
Sometimes the sprouts don't wait for the parent tree to fall, but just start growing from the side of the parent. These are called 'articulated trees'.
Articulated tree
Mother of the Forest
Mother of the Forest's sign
One of the trees in the nature walk is the tallest tree in the park, the "Mother of the Forest". As you can see from the sign, it's over 320 ft tall; you can see how it soars above the neighboring trees.
After that nice nature tour, I decided to hike up the Sequoia Trail to Sempervirens Falls and have lunch there. It was a tough walk; the trail goes up and down every bump in the side of the mountain and I was exhausted by the time I'd walked the less than 2 miles to the Falls. I saw some interesting trees on the way. For example, this tree was hollowed out with three entrances:
Views from inside the hollow tree
After all that hiking, the falls were a disappointment. I had expected something like Fall Hollow on the Natchez Trace, only bigger.
What I got was something like a side spring at Falls Hollow, only smaller
They also had everything below the observation platform blocked off, so you couldn't climb down and rest your feet in the cool water after that long hike. No place to sit, except on the ground, either. Bleh. I ate my lunch anyway--I was starving by that point. But still... Bleh.
I hiked back on the road--much flatter, easier walking. Not nearly so tiring. On the way, besides lots of redwoods, I noticed a stand of horsetails by the side of the road. I've always found these ancient, archaic plants interesting.
Horsetails
Close-up
After that, I got in my car and headed back to my apartment, dead tired. Not all my pictures came out... somewhere before the horsetails I manage to knock my camera's settings knob into manual focus mode, so a bunch of pictures came out too blurry to see. Far more came out than I've actually posted... I have a number of "just forest" pictures I haven't posted.
Next: I'm not sure what. Silicon Valley, perhaps?
These mountains, the coastal mountains, are not the dry, sere brown hills of the eastern, inland mountains. They're like the Appalachians - covered with tall conifers and quite green. Just how tall those trees are, I was soon to find out.
On the way up the mountains, there's quite a bit of vineyard country--you pass roads leading to quite a few California wineries. There's also several towns that don't look like they've changed much in a hundred years, or have been restored to their historic look.
Big Basin State Park is the entire watershed of Wadell Creek, which is to say it is a river valley, all its tributaries, and the moutains surrounding them. Getting to the Park HQ is a bit of an adventure--the winding two-lane road turns into a one-lane road part of the way. It's still winding through the mountains, though the mountains are heavily forested by that point--with really big trees. Right next to the road.
One lane road.
Sometimes chunks of the road are missing
Fortunately, I wasn't driving that way. That particular road was on my walk. After the long, lonely drive to get to the park headquarters, I was surprised to find that there's a zillion people at the park.
Big Basin Park Headquarters
There's also a zillion Stellar's Jays nicking scraps
Apparently, everyone else knows to come in the much easier-to-drive southern entrance. That's the route I used to leave, on the advice of one of the park rangers. It was indeed a much easier drive. I've already mentioned the big trees--they come in two flavors: Douglas fir, and the Coastal Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) that the park was created in 1902 to preserve.
Right in the parking lot
So tall, it's hard to photograph the whole thing!
The redwoods are interesting trees in a interesting environment. The coastal mountains get a lot of fog and moisture from the sea, and the redwoods drink it up, and exhale a vast amount of water per tree. It's very humid in a redwood forest--like being back in southern Lousiana, only not so miserably hot, and always shady.
My first hike, after parking and re-packing my back pack with lunch and a change of shirt in case I got hot (I did, and changed to a sleeveless shirt), was down the short Redwoods Trail Loop. There I was lucky enough to fall in behind a guided group with a park ranger giving explanatory lectures, so I learned a lot of interesting things.
Redwood bark is very fire resistant--you see fire-scarred trees all over the place.
Like this one
However, the heartwood is not so fire-resistant, resulting in many of the old trees being partially hollowed out; fire burns out the dead heartwood, but doesn't burn the fire-resistant bark and sapwood, so the tree doesn't die. Over the years, the tree tries to grow over the holes.
Typical hollowed-out tree
Chimney Tree, Redwoods Trail
This tree is special because not only is it hollowed out, but the top broke off, and it's hollow all the way to the sky. The tree is quite green and otherwise healthy.
You can see sky!
Redwood trees reproduce in a number of interesting ways. New shoots will sprout from just about any piece of tree--stump, branches, fallen logs, and burls.
Burls are like weird cancers that can grow at the base of the tree
The 'Animal Tree', Redwoods Trail Loop
Burls are not only very prolific when it comes to re-sprouting trees, they also mill and polish up into very beautify cabinet wood. Another lovely cabinet wood is 'wavy wood', a rare mutation of the grain pattern in redwoods.
Wavy Wood
Sometimes the sprouts don't wait for the parent tree to fall, but just start growing from the side of the parent. These are called 'articulated trees'.
Articulated tree
Mother of the Forest
Mother of the Forest's sign
One of the trees in the nature walk is the tallest tree in the park, the "Mother of the Forest". As you can see from the sign, it's over 320 ft tall; you can see how it soars above the neighboring trees.
After that nice nature tour, I decided to hike up the Sequoia Trail to Sempervirens Falls and have lunch there. It was a tough walk; the trail goes up and down every bump in the side of the mountain and I was exhausted by the time I'd walked the less than 2 miles to the Falls. I saw some interesting trees on the way. For example, this tree was hollowed out with three entrances:
Views from inside the hollow tree
After all that hiking, the falls were a disappointment. I had expected something like Fall Hollow on the Natchez Trace, only bigger.
What I got was something like a side spring at Falls Hollow, only smaller
They also had everything below the observation platform blocked off, so you couldn't climb down and rest your feet in the cool water after that long hike. No place to sit, except on the ground, either. Bleh. I ate my lunch anyway--I was starving by that point. But still... Bleh.
I hiked back on the road--much flatter, easier walking. Not nearly so tiring. On the way, besides lots of redwoods, I noticed a stand of horsetails by the side of the road. I've always found these ancient, archaic plants interesting.
Horsetails
Close-up
After that, I got in my car and headed back to my apartment, dead tired. Not all my pictures came out... somewhere before the horsetails I manage to knock my camera's settings knob into manual focus mode, so a bunch of pictures came out too blurry to see. Far more came out than I've actually posted... I have a number of "just forest" pictures I haven't posted.
Next: I'm not sure what. Silicon Valley, perhaps?
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Date: 2007-07-28 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-28 11:10 pm (UTC)