redwood coast
Dale Morris drives part of the California coastline and explores the region’s history, giant trees and beautiful landscapes.
An ethereal mist swirls like a phantom through delicate ferns and around the massive woody columns of a grove of mature redwood trees in Northern California’s Humboldt County. The dawning sun casts its rays through the branches, while distant call of a murder of crows creates a sense of tension here.
The mist deposits a chill layer upon my face, sending shivers down my spine. Somewhere, unseen among the fog and the foliage, a deer adds additional edginess to my sense of unease by snorting, stomping, then bounding noisily away.
There are no grizzlies in this part of California but there are black bears and mountain lions, both of which are hairy and scary enough to frighten a deer. They frighten me, too, but though the deep fog and the mysterious tone of these forests causes me to glance over my shoulder more than I normally would, there’s still a sense of magic here.
I crane my neck once more and peer up towards the obscured treetops 100 metres above, and I breathe in one last lungful of mossy-flavoured air before stepping back into my car to continue northwards up Highway 101. The road is flagged by giants.
Humboldt County, 435 kilometres or so north of San Francisco, is a small-town province that lies behind what some folk call ‘the redwood curtain’. Dominated by some of the tallest forests on Earth, Humboldt County and the surrounding region have a special appeal all their own. To the east, mountains, often snow-capped in winter, claw at the skies with ragged-toothed peaks, while along the Pacific Coast, waves of great magnitude hammer relentlessly at rugged stone cliffs. Beaches devoid of human footprints play host to no-one but crabs and seagulls and seals.
The romantically – and aptly – named ‘Lost Coast’ in the south of Humboldt County is a seaside wilderness inaccessible to all but those who know the secret trails and pathways that lead down to hidden beaches where awesome tubes tempt hardy surfers into frigid waters. Surfers here suffer their fair share of shark attacks but it doesn’t discourage them: the waves are just too good.
“Dude,” one frizzy-haired young man says to me as he walks, barefooted, through the forest, board tucked beneath his arm. “You see a shark, you ride the wave and try not to look like a seal.”
Pretty hard, I think, when you’re clothed in a black shiny wetsuit. I watch him and his buddies for a while while I linger on a lost-coast beach and then head back up Highway 101, driving north towards the little town of Ferndale. I find a bike hire shop and within an hour or two, I’m once more back among the magic trees.
Though Humboldt and the adjacent counties of Mendocino and Del Norte are an outdoor sportsperson’s dream, there are plenty of options for driving and exploring by road and many attractions that do not even require leaving your vehicle. Not only can you drive right up to some of the largest and most awesome trees in the county; local folk have been kind enough to chainsaw a car-sized tunnel right through one of them.
To truly experience the power of these forests, however, you must alight from your vehicle at least occasionally and take a hike among the towering trunks. Redwoods make you feel ever so small and not just because of their size: they have a presence, an aura that is somehow full of menace and mystery.
California’s giant trees are the largest living things ever to have existed on our planet; they are the oldest, too. But that’s just the beginning. When a giant redwood falls, it doesn’t really die. It grows anew, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of its apparent demise. New shoots or rather, clones, will sprout from the prone body, eventually turning into mighty giants themselves. And as such, one can justifiably claim that a redwood is more or less eternal.
Now, should you ever get bored of spending time among these mammoth plants, you can always retire to one of the quaint towns situated around the deepwater harbour of Humboldt Bay. Here, in places such as Arcata and Eureka, where the dining is fine and the pub culture is homely, you can experience the flavour of small-town America.
Northern California, you may have heard, is synonymous with organic ‘new-age’ alternative lifestylers, the type of people who grow their own vegetables and eat a lot of carrot cake. They take ‘green living’ seriously, and most of the people I met seemed to have a profound empathy for Humboldt’s forests and coastal conservation areas.
If you really want to see people truly living the new-age dream, however, you have to go back out to where the redwoods grow. There, along Highway 101 and its many tributaries, you will find quirky little communities where folk have built their wooden homes right up against the ramparts of the trees. Surfboards rest against mighty buttresses; wind chimes and Native American-style ‘dream-catchers’ dangle from the decking while out back in the garden, shrubs of an often illegal nature are grown.
Northern California is widely known among connoisseurs of inhalable herbs for its liberal laws on the propagation of ‘medical’ marijuana. Fruit-smoothie stalls do rather well in this part of the world.
Herb farms aside, Humboldt County boasts something like 6,100 square kilometres of grade A greenery, much of it redwood forest – and, as such, it’s a great place in which to ‘discover oneself’ and commune with nature.
And that’s what I did on my final day in Northern California.
I stepped from my car and walked one last time into the swirling mists to savour the flavour of moss-tainted air. I craned my neck to watch the sun scatter through the branches. I touched each tree I passed and, just as before, a murder of crows and the snort of a deer caused my skin to tingle and my head to turn.
But there was nothing there. Nothing that would hurt me, anyway. Only the trees and their magical ways. •
Photography by Dale Morris.
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