Forest Of Red Giants
Today was a hiking day, a hiking day through massive trees. Our first stop on the agenda was Jedediah Smith State Park, which is probably the most Southern name in the history of names, and yet it’s in California. The park is actually quit huge, but we decided on a section of it that’s on the Smith River and has a small campground, as well as a picnic area. I had brought out the camera again, so I used our walk along the beach and through the trees as an excuse to take lots of photo’s, especially of Kizmet. She’s very photogenic. The lighting in the trees kind of sucked, though, and the camera kept using the flash, which screwed up a lot of the pictures, so that was a little tad bit annoying. We walked along the river for a little while and
then did a loop through the trees. I found a massive stump that was shaped a little like a throne that I climbed up on. The redwoods are so cool, especially since all of them grow so straight. There aren’t any curves in those trunks. Like at all, ever. It’s really neat to see. Our second stop was Stout Grove. We were told that this was the area used to film the Endor scenes in The Return of the Jedi, but that proved to be wrong. The movie had actually been filmed in an area of the forest that no longer exists, since it was clearcut shortly after the filming pulled
out. The reason George Lucas chose this area to film is that it was relatively easy to get the rights, and he could clear out the underbrush to get better shots, since it was all going to be cut down anyway. It’s quite sad that people would destroy a forest like that, just for business but us human’s are rather a destructive bunch, aren’t we? The road to Stout Grove was mildly sketchy. It hardly had room for one car at a time in most places, although it was a two-way road, and it dropped off completely to the one side. It was also dirt, which meant that driving along it caused a lot of jostling and bouncing around. It wasn’t exactly my favourite road, and the whole drive was rather uncomfortable, so I was happy when we
arrived at our destination. Unfortunately, the path through Stout Grove said no dogs, so we had to leave Kizmet in the car while we walked around. However, no sooner had we started than we began to see dogs everywhere on the trail, so it turns out that that rule isn’t enforced. Mum was a little upset that Kizmet had stayed behind for nothing, but she likes to follow the rules, so there you go. The grove was very pretty and I got lots of pictures. The trail was a half-mile loop and it took us past this massive tree that had fallen over. It’s roots had been ripped out and
there was a huge hole in the ground, so that was cool to see. It didn’t take us long to complete the loop of the grove, we hopped back in the truck and took the scenic route back out to Crescent City. The scenic route followed the entirety of the same road we had driven in on, so sure, it was a very pretty drive, but it was also very bumpy. We got back to camp at around 5:00pm and had been lazing around for a bit when Dad went outside to empty the grey water tank and made an unfortunate discovery. Some arsecrown had cut the locks on our bikes and stolen Dad’s off the back on the trailer. Some week, hey? We had some bad luck in California. We put the other three bikes in the trailer during the night so we didn’t lose those too. I guess we’ll need new locks. Peace out m8s.