9/6: There is a road, that forks off of and runs parallell to 101, that goes straight through Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It is called Avenue of the Giants. And it doesn’t take long to understand what they mean by that name.
You drive through something like a tunnel of trees, with the canopy as an inpenetratable cover from the sun. In places, the trees are so huge and grow so densely, that you litterarily cannot see the forest for all the trees.
We were supposed to find a trail on a sideroad to the Avenue, that supposedly had the largest trees, but we got kind of lost and ended up taking a walk straight into the forest. There, we found this spring, and that, once the first bushes of undergrowth next to the road was behind us, the forest floor became quite open. So little sunlight was let through the canopies of these giant redwoods, that no plants couuld grow underneath them.
As you see, building a house out of one single piece of trunk would certainly be possible with these monsters.
Finally, we found another trail and I got to go on my last redwoods hike.
Well, the root system of the trees wasn’t that small either.
When we left the Avenue of the Giants and returned to the 101, I felt a little bit melancholic. That was the last I would see of these northern California redwoods. They are amazing organisms, and the forests are magical. Like from another world.
Katja Malmborg 