Hiking

Days 24-26: Redwoods and Pacific Coast CA

/ hmmartino6249 / Leave a comment

The road to our forest campsite took us through acres and acres of old-growth redwoods, which – if you haven’t been up close – are heart-stoppingly impressive. I decided to spring for the deluxe patio at Redwood Meadows because this was the point in our trip where we turned back inland and I wanted to celebrate how far we had come. It was wayyy more than I even expected. We had a great vantage point to view the area and were close to all the facilities.

The next day, we decided to go to a roadside attraction called Trees of Mystery. It was supposedly only ten minutes away from us. Well, if you are from the area, you’ll know what we did not know: there is no such thing as ten minutes away to the south of Crescent City (the nearest town), due to massive road work. They are completely ripping apart highway 101 and rebuilding it. Workers shut the highway down four hours a day for uninterrupted work time, and rest of the day they stop traffic in twenty minute intervals to allow one lane to pass. There’s no way around this road, because it’s tribal land to the east, and nothing else to the west but ocean. So, we decided on suffering through what amounted to a one-hour delay to get to the attraction, shutting the engine off, and staring at the Redwoods all around us until our lane got to move. We even had time to pick flowers and raspberries on the side of the road.

We arrived at Trees of Mystery to find a massive Paul Bunyan statue, complete with his pet ox. We got our tickets and walked down the path. Unlike the pared down natural aesthetic of trails in most of the parks we’d already visited, this trail was something along the lines of if Disneyworld carved a path and put up signage and rides along the way. Nonetheless, it was still magnificent to see so many different gargantuan species of trees. The semi-circle of trees that formed “the Cathedral” were interesting and photogenic. After that, there was a suspended path through the canopy, where you can get up close and personal with the tops of the redwoods (and where I suffered through my fear of heights to enjoy the walk with my family.) Everyone (but me) loved it. Afterwards, we stopped for an obligatory photo in front of “The Brotherhood Tree” before taking a gondola to the top of the mountain and look out across the forest towards the ocean.

On the way back we saw a “Candelabra Tree” which had multiple trees growing out of a fallen Redwood. There were a few more fallen trees as well. The last part of the walk were a number of carvings depicting the “life” of Paul Bunyan starting with really freaky baby images and moving on from there.

We stayed until nearly four and then headed home, only to find out that we couldn’t pass through Route 101 until 7. It was entirely shut down for hours. Matthew declared that he had to get an In N Out burger before we left California, so we decided to head south to get some in Eureka. It was over an hour away, but what else did we have to do? So, we hit the road and traveled through some beautiful valleys full of streams and grazing elk, along with periodic small towns.

On the way back, we took our last visit to a Pacific Coast beach. This one was full of black, volcanic sand and was absolutely stunning. As was the case with every beach we stopped at over the last few days, there were very few other tourists to contend with, and the temperatures were cool and windy. When we all had our fill, we went home and had a quiet night amid the Redwoods.

Days 19-21: Olympic National Forest WA

/ hmmartino6249 / Leave a comment

While leaving my Aunt and Uncle’s house, my cousin’s husband noticed a drip under the truck. Since I had already intended to get an oil change, I decided to get the truck looked at as soon as I could. I had already struck out at Walmart for a quick oil change the day before. Since I had more going on than just a standard service, I got a recommendation for a great mechanic in Port Angeles and he had availability that afternoon, so I set up an appointment.

Being only a couple hours from our campsite at Crescent Beach, we arrived there as early as was possible to check in. The place was breathtaking. Stretching across the vista in front of our camper was an extensive private beachfront on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We could very clearly see Vancouver Island, and – in fact – we were so close that we picked up Canadian cell service. Behind the site were the Olympic Mountains, which were visible from the beach when the cloud cover lifted.

After the family got settled into our campsite, and Matthew and I took a walk on the beach, I took off to grab groceries. One of the people at the campsite told me there was a little store up the street called Joyce General Store that had basics and I was fine with that. Little did I know it was the most quaint general store I would see on our trip. It was like stepping back in time. I picked up a couple of “special” treats for Chris there – because I love him so.

After dropping off the groceries, I took the truck up to Port Angeles to be looked at. It turns out there was just a lot of air conditioning condensation dripping, but the mechanic found the sway bar was broken and fixed it. Plus we got an oil change. The view from the town wasn’t too shabby either. All in all, it was a great afternoon. Unfortunately, when I got back I discovered Izzy had gotten my form of the cold and was feeling miserable. While I made a soup dinner for her and the familiy, the boys played beach volleyball on the campground’s court. I took a walk on the beach as the food cookded. That evening, we sat around the campfire to get warm. (Did I mention it was considerably colder here than anywhere we’d been so far?)

The next day, we forewent driving up the mountains of Olympic National Park. Izzy was stuffed up and I didn’t want her ears to hurt with the altitude change. Besides, we’d been to mountains already and would see more later in the trip. So, we headed in the direction of the Olympic National Forest’s lower trails into the rainforest. In order to get to these trails we had to go through Forks – where Bella meets Edward in the infamous Twilight series of books. We stopped, ate some really yummy Italian food, and let Chris do some work in the car outside of the library in Forks. Verizon cell phone reception was not great in the area, so he needed the steady WiFi. Izzy sat in the car and rested, while Matthew and I went into some shops and then the hardware store. I had to get a dish drying rack that fit a small trailer, extra large ziploc bags to hold the sewer line when we stow it since the first one fell apart, and 3M hooks to help keep towels off the floor. By this point, I was growing a bit obsessed with using Command hooks to solve trailer life mess-related issues.

More than one shop in Forks featured movie and book merch, plus there is also a museum dedicated to Twilight (which had a line out the door). Interestingly, the movie wasn’t even filmed in Forks. While movie/book tourists are a new economy, the mainstay of the area is – apparenty, according to the sign below – logging.

After lunch in Forks we drove to the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park. Although there were loads of warnings that we would encounter delays due to road work coming into the park, we must have hit the flaggers at all the right times. Windows rolled down and listening to 90s hip hop on Spotify, we soaked in the cool air and smells of the forest.

When we reached the visitor’s center, we found packed parking lots. However, turnover for spots was high in the late afternoon, and we found one right near the trailheads easily. As a family, we took the Spruce Nature Trail, which had a variety of sights: old growth and new growth trees, Hoh River views, and bridges over streams. We did not run into the bad-tempered elk that we were warned against at the trailhead, but we did find a banana slug, which was a little gross. It was a shame that we arrived after a long dry spell because a lot of undergrowth and mosses were brown and wilted. That didn’t diminish how verdant the whole forest was, with moss hanging from branches, green plants carpeting the ground, and leaves sprouting from every level of the canopy. At the end of the trail, I took Izzy to rest in the truck while Chris and Matthew hiked the Hall of Mosses Trail.

Days 7-10: Makoshika State Park MT

/ hmmartino6249 / Leave a comment

Here’s something important to know about me: I loooooove fossils. I mean, I was very nearly a paleontologist. So, when I discovered there was this park in Montana – Makoshika – that had a ton of fossils you could see on the grounds, I plopped us down there for a few days.

The RV park we were at in Glendive was very inexpensive, but was clean and had all the utilities. It was essentially in the industrial part of town, but only a few blocks from the park, and very near a laundromat and a car wash (which was also a must at this point as MN was BUGGY). The morning that laundry had to be done, Chris was at virtual work, so the task fell to me. Now I sat in that laundromat for a good two hours and saw only men coming and going. Towards the end of my stay, a woman came in and I told her she was the first woman I’d seen in hours. I asked her if perhaps Glendive was a town where the woman all got their men to do laundry. She laughed and said that no, in fact, the railroaders come off the train and do all their laundry on certain mornings and then they’re off again. She said that most days it was women in there. Ah well, my fantasy bubble was burst.

The next day, we had our first scheduled activity. For ten bucks a head, we were given a behind the scenes tour of Makoshika’s paleontological lab and were taken on a hike by the on-staff paleontologist and park ranger. It was so incredible to see all the fossils they had pulled from this park, and we even get to see some hadrosaur bones in the ground along our hike.

A bizarre, yet fun, feature of this park that we were unaware of was that it was home to a disc golf range. It’s like frisbee into metal nets on poles far away. It’s played like, well, like golfing with a frisbee-disc. Matthew bought one and tried his hand at a few holes. Baskets? Nets? Anyway. He enjoyed it.

In other news, the noxious gas detector went haywire in the middle of the night, scaring us and the dog (see picture for where we found her when it all went down). There were no gasses leaking anywhere. This is something that was supposedly fixed before we left but obviously it was not. So, I did a little on the spot electrical wire removal to yank that thing out of the wall and then I was able to order a new plug in model from a local hardware store over the internet. At midnight. I was able to pick it up the next day. Ahhh modern convenience.