Redwood Trees

The Coastal Redwood Trees in Northern California are truly an amazing sight. It is impossible to capture in pictures the tremendous size and beauty of these trees. You feel like a dwarf walking through them. The tree above and to the left is called The Big Tree. It is 304 feet tall, has a diameter of 21 1/2 feet and is about 1500 years old.

The weather there was perfect! I was a little concerned at first that I had forgotten our jackets because it was rather cool and there was an almost constant mist amongst the trees. Luckily though I had remembered long pants for everyone and that was fine for the day we were there (plus it helped that we did some hiking). The temperature was in the 60s there and it was just beautiful! If you look in the bottom left of this picture you can see me & if you look closer you can see M&M standing next to me.

We took a hike from The Big Tree that was supposed to be about 1.4 miles, but the trail was not marked very well and we ended up having to do some backtracking to get back to our car. I think we ended up hiking over 2 miles (and I ended up carrying Kitty & DH was carrying Blondie so we could hike faster).
These are two trees (above) that we had to climb over to get to the other side of the trail. We are standing on one and there is a second one in front of that one.
These trees are incredibly resilient. This tree had been hollowed out by fire, but amazingly is still alive.

I would definitely recommend the redwood trees to anyone who hasn't seen them. The hard part about visiting them is that there isn't just one place to go. These trees are all along the coastline of Northern California and there are National Parks and State Parks interspersed. We hiked the trail at The Big Tree and then we also hiked a one mile trail at a site called Lady Bird Johnson Grove where this last picture was taken (incidentally we were there the day after she passed away). It is a self-guided tour where you take a map with you and there are numbers marked along the way with descriptions of different spots of interest in the forest.

There are a few privately owned "drive-thru" trees that you have to pay to go through, but they were too far out of our way and we were running short on time.