Tuesday, October 17th 2023
The weather was better the following day and we wanted to go back to Crescent City and Jedidiah to do some additional exploring and hiking. Although the weather was cool, it was a beautiful day with beautiful scenery and Jedidiah had a different feel with the sun.
We started with driving along the ocean, stopping in and around Crescent city to appreciate the coast line. We actually ran into our tour guide from the day before when wet stopped at one of the beaches. We then headed back into Jedidiah Redwoods state park.
A couple of years back, I had pulled a page out of a “Visit California” magazine that had an article called “A Geek’s Guide to California”, there was a picture of a man standing in a Redwood Grove looking up with a smaller picture below with had George Lucas, next to Princess Leah, Chewbacca, Hans Solo, C3PO and R2D2 with redwood trees behind them. The article talked about the Sci-Fi movies that had been filmed in the area.
It wasn’t there to find the exact places where E.T. finally went home or the areas that served as also served as the moon of Endor, home of the Ewoks in the Return of the Jedi, the scenes in Jurassic Park: The Lost World, but it made me want to explore it even more.
At the visitors center, Sophon bought a T-Shirt that said ‘May the Forest Be With You”. The guy behind the counter talked about when Carrie Fisher who was with Paul Simon at the time was seen around town. He mentioned that the filming location of ET was on private land and it had been logged along with the Ewok village. I was sad to hear it. I had read (and later heard on our tour) that since Europeans settled the US, over 95% of the redwood forests had been logged. That is a staggering amount.
We found everyone working at the various visitors centers very friendly and helpful. We stopped to get maps and to ask recommendations on where to to hike. After driving the length of the park, we decided to hike to the Grove of the Titans which has some of the largest redwood trees.
At the end of the trail, there was a park ranger. I thought it was nice of the park to put someone at the end of the hike. Later, I realized that he was there to watch and make sure we stayed on the protected walkways. One of the things he talked about was how that the grove was discovered in the 1990s. In 2007, Richard Preston wrote a New York Times best seller called “The Wild Trees” about big-tree hunters who find and climb the biggest and oldest trees and at the center of the book was the Grove of the Titans. After the book was published, people were going off-trail to find the grove, trampling ferns and damaging the forest floor. They completed the trails and the protective walkways in 2021.
After a wonderful day, we headed back to the hotel for dinner. We headed home the next day. I decided to stop in Sacramento to break the 12 hour drive making into a two day drive. It was a great road trip and I am really looking forward to exploring more of the West Coast.
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