October 16th, 2023
I woke up and it was raining. I was hoping by the time our tour started, the rain would let up but it hadn’t. I had booked the Ultimate Redwood Experience from the redwood Sightseeing Tour Company and when met our tour guide met us in Crescent City, CA, I could tell he was hoping that we would postpone until the following day. We had made the half hour drive from Brookings, OR to Crescent City, CA and we were the only ones on this Group Tour and I wanted to spend the following day exploring on my own and we were visiting a rain forest.
We made a few stops around crescent City and then we headed into Jedidiah State Park. I was a bit confused because I had seen it listed as a State Park as well as a National Park. The guide explained that it was comanaged by the National Park Service and California State Parks as are other Redwood Parks in the area.
It is difficult to describe the experience. The trees are 300 feet tall and thousands of years old, it makes you feel small and yet part of something bigger. The air is fresh and earthy, it felt healthy to be breathing it. The grove is shaded, leaving plants that can grow in limited light, it is eerily quiet with no birds and surprisingly, no bugs.
Our guide found a banana slug which is a large slug the color of a banana. As we drove through the park, he mentioned that if we were to go through a time warp and come out the other side in a Model T, everything around us would look the same. I told him that I wondered if my parents and grandparents hadn’t driven this same road and how it probably looked the same.
We stopped and hiked the Stout Grove trail and to say that it was scenic was an understatement, everywhere I looked I wanted to take a picture but knew, that it would be difficult to capture the essence which is why I spent more time experiencing it than trying to capture it.
As we continued on, the driver stopped and pointed at a group of plants and asked if we knew what they were. I surprised him when I immediately recognized them as carnivorous Pitcher Plants and went on to say they are rare and protected. I explained that when I was growing up, I had a fascination with carnivorous plants and there was a collector in a neighboring town. Unfortunately, I learned that he was known to have been collecting them from the wild, which is something that you should never do. I added that this was that this was the first time I had ever seen a carnivorous plant in the wild.
We crossed over Smith River which runs through the park and the guide told us that they had filmed the scene with Sandra Bullock rowing down the river while blindfolded not too far from there. It was no surprise that the park had been used in various films.
As we exited the park, we saw a large herd of Elk. We stopped to look and listen to them, I was surprised at how large they were yet made these alarming high pitched screams. All in all a fascinating day!
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