Ft. Bragg & Mendocino, Ca.

Fri - Nov. 13th

Just a few oddities at Ft. Bragg to get our day started. This is Glass Beach. It used to be a city dump for many years. Then in the 90s they decided to clean it up. The only things left after the clean up were small colored pieces of broken glass which over time have been polished and rounded

off by the tides and sands, thus the name. The top
grave is a lady who was a member of the Donner Party and the next one was a member of the Donner Rescue Party. You know how John likes those little tidbits of trivia.

I'm not sure if you can make out this
picture, but the top of the house is
built in the shape of a boat.

This house has a stage Coach step out front. I never knew there was such a thing. There are still several hitching posts around town.

This is the town history museum and a slice from a redwood and all the pertinent information about when it was cut down and it's dimensions.

After lunch we headed south a few miles to the little sea village of Mendocino, better known as Cabot Cove, Maine to those of you who watched "Murder She Wrote" when it was on TV. Many movies have been filmed in this area since the 1930s, including "East of Eden" with James Dean and "Dying Young" with Julia Roberts.

There were lots great old houses here, but I thought the water towers were the most interesting. There were lots of them all over town and they were still being used, and there were
several wind mils, too. Lots of the towers had been enclosed for storage and some had been turned into living quarters. I thought they would be cool to live in.

After our tour of Mendecino, we returned to our camp at Pomo RV Park in Ft. Bragg and went to watch the sunset again at Pomo Bluff Park.

Another beautiful day.

Tarra

Garberville to Ft. Bragg, Ca.

Thur - Nov. 12th

We left Garberville about 9:30 with the fog hanging in the valleys again. Just a few miles south was this 2100 year old redwood log hollowed out for a home in 1946. It took the owner
and a helper 8 months to hollow out the 42 ton section into a 7 foot by 32 foot room. The home went on tour in it's early days and remains on it's original trailer. We took another windy road from Leggett over to the coast. It was 22 miles and took us an hour. It was a tense ride meeting semis and other RVs on swithback turns. There were many curve signs saying 10, 15 and 20 MPH. Are you
kidding me? We would have had to speed up to go that fast. John says we won't need to ever take that road again. This gray whale skeleton was at MacKerricher State Park. We set up camp in Ft. Bragg and went down to Point Cabrillo State Park to see the Mendocino Light House. On the way back to camp, we stopped at Pomo Bluffs State Park in Ft. Bragg to watch the sunset.

Back to camp for pizza and wine. Blogging for Tarra, and cable and snoozing for John.

Looking forward to wineries, breweries and chocolate shops tomorrow.

Tarra

More Redwoods

Wed - Nov. 11th

We started about 10:30 this morning with the usual fog hanging in the valleys. We headed back to the Avenue of the Giants and to the Mattole Road through Rockefeller Forest in the north part of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. John said this road makes the Avenue of the Giants look like a super highway. The road was narrow, bumpy, winding and switchbacks up and down, up and down for about five hours (130 miles) minus the time we stopped to hike and gauk. This live tree is just an example of how damp it is in the forest. Moss and other green plants just grow everywhere.

Thank goodness for the park service's strategic
placement of the all important privy! The seasonal bridges across the Eel River had been removed to prevent them from being destroyed in the spring floods. So we walked across the river on a fallen log to see the Giant Tree and the Flat Iron Tree.

The Flat Iron Tree was a fallen tree that was kind
of oval-shaped like an iron, 17 and a half feet across one way and 7 and a half feet the other way. The Giant Tree was measured in 1991 at 363 feet
tall with a circumference of 53 feet and a 62 foot

crown.

We stopped to visit with a couple from Sweden. They had just flown in yesterday from San Francisco
to see the redwoods. They told us that there has recently been a discovery of the oldest tree in the world somewhere in Sweden. It is supposedly 12,000 years old. They are not telling anyone where it is, for fear of the public mobbing the place and harming the tree. This is the Tall Tree measured in 1957 at 360 feet with a 42 foot circumference and a 13.4 foot diameter.

This is a one lane bridge going into the small town of Honeydew. Sounds nice, doesn't it? I forgot to
mention that there are signs all over in the parks warning that there are bears. On seeing one of these John asked, "If a bear shows up, you're not expecting me to do the chivalrous thing are you?" Hmm. Not the first foolish assumption I ever made. I guess I'll wear good running shoes from now on.

From Honeydew we took Wilder Ridge Road down to Shelter Cove on the coast. This is part of King Range National Conservation Area. The light house had originally been 35 miles north, but was no longer being used, so they moved it down here to preserve it. We saw pinniped seals at Seal Rock here. They come in on the rocks to rest and hide from sharks and other predators. We saw a dog here carrying a starfish around in his mouth. There is a 27 mile hiking trail here along the Lost Coast.

Then we headed back to Garberville and south to Richardson Grove State Park for one more hike thru the redwoods where we learned a few more things. Redwoods can survive forest fires because they have such thick bark. It can burn off all the outer bark with no harm, as long as it doesn't burn the inner bark. It can also burn the heartwood or

center of the tree, leaving it hollowed out, as long as it doesn't burn the sapwood. The hollowed out parts

of the tree are called goose pens, because the pioneers used them to keep their animals in and sometimes even to live in.

The last two pictures are two parts of the same tree. There is a burl part way up on the main tree. These grow on redwoods to help them reproduce. Forest debris tends to collect on them, providing a perfect place for seedlings to get started. This tree happens

to have a very large, fullsized tree growing from it.

Burls can weigh up to 60 tons.

Heading south tomorrow to Mendicino County.

Over and Out,
Tarra

Redwoods - Avenue of the Giants

Tue - Nov. 10th

We are at a campground near Garberville. We drove thru "The Avenue of the Giants" today and will drive thru the rest of it tomorrow. I don't know why I couldn't buy redwood in Brookings, when I needed it. We drove by several places with lots and lots of redwood stacked up and ready to ship.

We are in Humboldt Redwoods State Park where 20% of all the coastal redwoods in the world are found. Redwoods produce between 90 and 120 pine cones a year. The pine cones are about the size of the end of my thumb and each one produces 100,000 seeds per year. However, 90% are never fertilized due to fungus or other reasons. Redwoods can live to be 2000 to 3000 years old, but usually die from lightning, fires, etc. before they reach old age. A dead tree is called a

snag and supports 1000 species of life in the forest. A fallen rotting log supports as many as 4000 species. It takes approximately 400 years for a log to rot.

John is standing at the base of a fallen tree. I am standing at the base of the "Dyerville Giant" that fell in 1991. It was 370 feet tall, one of the tallest trees in the world. It was 52'4" around and weighed more than a loaded 747 jumbo jet (1 million pounds).

The "Immortal Tree", with the sign in front of it, is approximtely 1000
years old and was 298 feet tall before lightning broke off the top 50 feet. It has also survived the loggers axe, a fire in 1908 and a flood in 1964 caused by an unusual snow fall. There is a mark showing the high water line of the flood about 20 feet up on the tree. It is 14 and a half feet in diameter at the base and would produce 104,380 board feet of lumber, enough to build several homes.

The last picture was taken for my granddaughter, Tierney, in the little town of Holmes between Pepperwood and Redcrest.

We have seen lots of bikers and hitch hikers. The bikers are loaded down with four saddle bags, plus tent and bed roll. The coast highway has a biker lane in most places. Sometimes the road gets so narrow, there is no room left to mark a lane for them. Some of the bridges have a traffic light they can push to let cars know that there is a biker on the bridge or in the tunnel, in case the cars can't see them. I hardly consider myself a real biker anymore after having seen so many of them on these narrow, steep, winding roads carrying such a heavy load. Wow!

I fixed steak, rice and veggies for supper and we had a couple glasses of Pinot Noir. I am hoping we will have time to do a little wine tasting at some of the local wineries as we pass through. We plan to be at John's sister's by the 20th. She has tickets for us to go to a football game in Fresno.

More redwoods and hiking tomorrow.

Good night all,

Tarra

Arcata & Ferndale, Ca.

Mon - Nov. 9th

The palm trees are the gateway to the waterfront boardwalk at Arcata and the Old Town area with lots of awesome architecture.

After spending the morning checking out the great architecture of all the old homes and businesses, we went to the Samoa Cookhouse
for lunch. It is the last lumber camp style
cookhouse in operation in North America.
It was part of Samoa, one of the last company

owned towns in the U.S. They have served meals
there continuously since 1893, to
lumber company employees only until the late 1960s.

After lunch we headed south to Ferndale, known as "Cream City", because of the concentration of dairies in the
area.

At Ferndale we discovered
old cemeteries, one on each side of the same hill. They were quite unique. Once again we walked around gauking at all the awesome architecture. I think Fern-
dale was the best of them all, but I highly recommend
walking thru Arcata and Eureka, also. What a beautiful area this is with
the architecture, the ocean
and the redwoods.

Tarra