Avenue of the Giants

Hey Guys!! We spent one very full week in Myers Flat trying to spend as much time among the tall trees as we could. Our RV park was actually on the Avenue of Giants road. There were some pretty nice sized redwoods right in our neighborhood that week.

The Avenue of the Giants is a 31 mile scenic drive through part of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. The huge trees line the road as you drive through one of the largest remaining old growth redwood forests in the world.

The coastal redwoods can live a loooong life. Some reach upwards of 2,000 years old. See the marker closest to Alex? That marks how big the tree was when the Viking’s discovered North America in the year 1000. The last one…was the year the California State Park system was established in the year 1928.

We saw some really big trees when we were in Sequoia National Park…we saw some tall trees while we were in Redwood National Park…but this tree was our first taste at just how incredibly tall the coastal redwoods can get. The Founders Tree stands at 346.1 feet tall and has a circumference of 12.7 feet.

Have you ever heard of an albino tree? No? We hadn’t either, but in one of the brochures I picked up there was a mention of albino redwoods hidden somewhere within the many groves of redwoods along the Avenue of Giants. We asked around and actually managed to lay eyes on one. An albino tree has to grow off of another tree. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t spot it on the picture on the left, they’re kind of hard to see. This one was growing almost two hundred feet off the ground out of the side of another redwood. We looked for others as we explored, but we never found another one.

Redwoods can grow to weigh more than 500 tons and reach a height taller than the Statue of Liberty, but their root systems are amazingly shallow…which is why most of them die from toppling over from either wind or to much water from storms. I think we might have seen just as many redwoods lying down as there were standing tall.

The Dyerville Giant once stood an astonishing 370 feet high. Guys, that’s 200 feet taller than the Niagara Falls! This tree was considered the tallest tree in the world until it fell in 1991 as another tree fell into it during a storm. The Dyerville Giant was so big that when it fell it shook the ground hard enough for a nearby seismograph to pick up the tremors. We walked the length of it a couple of times marveling at the sheer size of it. In the upper right picture, you can see the hole the Dyerville left in the canopy when it fell. While standing, the Giant had a crown spread of seventy-four feet.

A redwood’s trunk can grow up to twenty-two feet in diameter with a bark that can be more than twelve inches thick.

The Big Tree area of Humboldt Redwoods State Park is in the Rockefeller Forest section. Some of the trees in the Rockefeller Forest are close to 2,000 years old.

This is Tall Tree. It stands at 359.3 feet with a circumference of 42 feet. It’s big. I took way more pictures of trees in this one week than I’ve ever taken in my life. Trees. It’s hard to explain why these titan trees fascinate us so much. There’s something about standing next to a living thing that’s been in the world for so long…

We did other things too. We found a great little zoo in Eureka. Nicholas just told you all about that though, so I won’t go into it. I will say, that the red panda exhibit was the best we’ve seen yet!

We found a great little pizza place in Miranda, CA…right down the road from where we stayed.

Well, I could ramble on forever about tall trees. I took enough pictures of them to fill several posts. If I ever talk Jerl into going back to California it will be to see the tall trees.

See y’all down the road!

#westernloop2018

#wehearttalltrees