A Drive Through a Giant's Land

The night before we had parked our car on the edge of a cliff, not knowing what was below. In the morning light, our view from inside the car was still obstructed from the moisture clinging to the windows. As soon as we cleared them, the view was breath taking. I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

Not wanting to leave, we back tracked to the nearest town to grab a bite to eat then quickly turn around to continue driving north to see the Redwood forest. As we were driving back past our cliff camping spot, someone was parked in the lot taking pictures. We had avoided the tourists! The road immediately took us into the surrounding hills and popped us back to the ocean side often. The roads we were driving on last night held many treasures that would could now see in the day light. We had been passing through thick forests of the largest trees I will ever see in my life. Dotted here and there, these ginormous trees loomed above us to cover the road in archways with their branches. Some trees even caused the road to quick turn to go around the trunks. This post will be mainly pictures because there are so many cool shots I want to share. We never went to the National Redwood Forest because the trees were everywhere along the highway and we found ourselves in places where there weren’t a lot of people. The weather was terrible. When I say terrible, we literally had every kind of weather you can image happen to us on this day. Sunny, cloudy, windy, not windy, cold, hot, rain, sleet and snow. I joked about what can happen next and it instantly started hailing. WHAT?! The roads we traveled led us through small towns and tourist traps. But, one in particular was exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to drive through a tree and we did precisely that. I couldn’t see anywhere near the top of the tree and the branches grew out, turned directly 90 degrees and continued growing upward. The thickness of this ‘branch’ was exactly the size of a full grown tree. How in the word does this tree support all of the weight!? Chad and I detoured through the Avenue of the Giants, saying that this would suffice for not going into the actual Redwood Forest. The trees are nothing special, they look like any other regular tall pine tree you would see up north. But the sheer size of the average tree trunk was bigger than the length of our Diesel Jetta.

I convinced Chad to park a few times to get out and explore at the base of the trees. One particular time we traveled further than the designated tourist area to explore away from the road.

According to pamphlet I grabbed at the beginning of the Avenue, this area had never been logged or touched by humans other than putting a road through this location. It was truly obvious. The trees when they died or were blown over, fell in straight rows. The trunks of the trees were so straight that when Chad and I went exploring, we walked on top of them as if they were highways or sidewalks in the forest. But to get on top of one of the fallen trees was another issue.

Standing next to the fallen trunk, Chad (6 ft) couldn’t even reach his hand out to touch the top of it. We had to find other rocks or fallen trees that had decayed enough in order to climb up onto the dead tree. It was sprinking rain and if you looked up, you could slowly see individual rain drops falling from the branches above. I made a game out of catching the drops in my mouth like you would with snow flakes. Having been seeing the majestic trees all day, we cut the tour of the Avenue of the Giants short to hop onto the highway. It was late afternoon and we still had to go through mountainous terrain at the tip of California to get to Oregon. The weather seemed to be getting worse and decided to rush through areas to get as far as we could before freezing weather struck.

Royal's Model Shots for a Volkswagen Advertisement

Yellow Eyes

The sun light was blocked from the large pines as we climbed in and out of mountain hills. Finally, we were spit out onto flat land and were greeted by the sight of a town, Crescent City, in the distance. I really needed to use the bathroom and none of the gas stations were open. We finally pulling into a Denny’s and I stepped out hurriedly. From listening to the audio book, there was a scene describing the main character fighting bare handed with wolves, the look of hunger in the wolves’ eyes and details describing how she escaped alive. As I stepped out of the car, door still swinging shut, I found myself not more than 5 feet away from a wolf-like animal staring at me with gold eyes. It happened so fast, but time stood still for me. While stepping out of the car, the noise had woken a sleeping dog that was resting under the bushes surrounding the Denny’s building. The large dog casually jumped down off the ledge retaining wall that housed the bushes and stood to stare at me from the sidewalk.

Maintaining eye contact, I reached back to grab the still moving door and thrusted myself into the passenger seat panting as if I had just sprinted a 400-meter dash. “There -there’s – THERE’S A WOLF RIGHT THERE!” I screamed as Chad looked up from Google Maps. I calmed down and leaned forward to watch my foe. It was a very large, wolf-like dog with matted brown and grey hair. It didn’t seem to have a collar on as it lurked away through the parking lot. I sure did not want to go back outside but my bladder was going to burst any minute. Needless to say, I was very alert for a long time after this encounter.