Memorial Day Weekend, 2004

It was a superlative weekend – as in, a weekend filled with superlatives like “largest”, “tallest”, “most beautiful” and so on.

We’ve been playing auto tourist most weekends in Southern California, but they were all day trips. For Memorial Day, we decided to take a weekend road trip up to Northern California.

Friday evening, we left Thousand Oaks, on the back road (complete with an operating mine in Grime’s Canyon, where they mine rocks and sand) to I-5 North and we spent the night at Three Rivers, right outside Sequoia National Park.

We stopped at the Holiday Inn Express in Three Rivers, got up early the next morning and headed into Sequoia National Park, where there are a large number of the California Mountain Redwoods.

There are two main kinds of redwoods in California: Coastal and Mountain. Both are redwoods, but the Coastal Redwoods are taller (including the tallest tree in the world – see below) and the Mountain Redwoods that are larger (as in more massive).

The National Park road travels up from about 1,500 feet of elevation to about 4,000 feet and begins to enter some of the redwood groves. Sequoia National Park has made huge efforts in the past couple of decades to reverse the effects of man in the area. In the 1950s, in the middle of the redwood groves, there were a series of cabins, restaurants and gift shops. This had a significant impact on the eco-system and the redwoods were suffering. Since then, things have gone back much more natural (for example, there are now no gas stations inside the park grounds).

Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and an early start in the morning gave us an almost empty park to drive through. The scenery was beautiful as the road twisted and turned its way up to the higher elevations. Once you are high enough, the amazing Mountain Redwoods appear.

“Massive” is the only term that describes these trees. “Standard” trees narrow as they get taller. The mountain redwoods do narrow, but not very much: they look more like a column. When that massive column is 250+ feed tall and 60 feet around, that is a LOT of tree.

We found our way over to the General Sherman tree (named after the Civil War general). It is acknowledged as being the largest (as in “massive”) tree in the world. This tree (which is still growing) weighs more than two 747s jet airliners or 11 Blue Whales. It is not the oldest tree, or even the oldest Sequoia (it is estimated to be around 1,700 years olds; some of the Sequoias are more than 2,000 years old) but it has grown amazing well. Botanists have found no indication that Sequoias ever die of “old age”: most of the ones that fall are blown over by wind. For all of their size, the roots only grow about 12 feet down and out about 50 to 60 feet from the tree.

Pictures simply cannot do it justice, but we tried.

The climate in the area where the General Sherman is located is apparently the best in the world for the Sequoias – several of the largest sequoias are within a 5 square mile area. They require moisture year round (not necessarily rain, but the ground needs to remain moist), not too cold (so they don’t grow above 5,000 feet) and specific other criteria to thrive.

Oddly enough, one of the criteria is fire: fire is a critical element of the Sequoia reproduction cycle. Mature Sequoias don’t have too much trouble with fire: their bark is extremely thick, the branches are usually high enough not to catch file and Sequoias heal quickly.

The heat of the fire causes certain cones on the Sequoias to open and scatter seeds. The fire also clears off the underbrush and provides a fertile environment for the seeds.

The National Park Service has now started letting the lighting strike started fires continue and burn out: when the fires were stopped, no new sequoias were being germinated.

There is a nice trail around the General Sherman area and it is truly beautiful.

We continued across the upper spine of the mountains to King’s Canyon National Park, where we saw the Robert. E. Lee tree and the General Grant tree. We then turned west and headed across California’s central valley to San Francisco, where we stayed.

On Saturday, we headed north into Northern California.

San Franciscoians have to build on the steep hills; there simply isn’t anywhere else in the area to build.

We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge (the “most beautiful suspension bridge in the world), looked across at Alcatraz (“America’s toughest prison”) and continued into Northern California.

Suddenly, the climate and terrain were startlingly different.

Southern California is, on the whole, desert (if you want to see what mountains here in Southern California look like, watch a rerun of MASH – it was filmed about 15 miles from our apartment in the Santa Monica mountains, and it is pretty representative). Northern California is not a desert – it is actually pretty lush. The lushness seems to start right around San Francisco and continues north from there.

It is amazing how BIG California is… Teresa and I have taken road trips just about every weekend and we’ve only left the state once on those trips. Northern California is quite different than Southern California. Several areas are regarded as “hippie communities” and most of the areas are much more laid back then the hustle in Southern California. On the way, we stopped at a local restaurant and had a buffalo burger (pretty good) and purchased an antique doll bed from 1946 (now officially the cat’s bed).

The Avenue of the Giants is in Humboldt State Park; the old road runs through the Coastal Redwood groves. The Avenue of the Giants is right in the middle of the groves; in some cases, it feels like your car will brush the bark of one of the trees. The coastal redwoods are the tallest trees in the world, but the scale is tough to convey. The mature forest looks like a lot of other mature evergreen forests (quiet, not a lot of undergrowth, dim from the sun being filtered out); it is only when you realize how HIGH you have to look up that the fact that you are in the center of incredibly TALL trees really starts to hit you.

These trees are also, on the whole, younger than the Sequoias. They look more like “regular” trees (i.e. they narrow as they go up); they just go a LONG way up.

We spent a pleasant afternoon driving, stopping and sightseeing. We took a side road that took us to the “Giant Tree”, which, at 363 feet, is currently accepted as the tallest tree in the world.

One of the more amazing things about this area is the 1964 flood. There is a river that runs through the area (both the Avenue of the Giants and 101 cris-cross it). In 1964, they had unusually high snowfall, which had the river running high; then 16 inches of rain fell in a 24 hour period across the entire watershed.

This happened almost 40 years ago and you can still see some of the evidence. One of the towns (primarily caters to the tourist trade) was under 33 feet of water at high water of the flood

CA-101, which is well up on the hill, has signs that show the high water marks. On most of the drive (with the road looking down over the river), our car would have been completely submerged. This flood really was amazing – yet most of the Redwoods simply rode it out.

Of course, the man made tourist attractions are there as well, like the Chandelier Tree:

We then turned south and began the trip back to San Francisco. We took a different route, though: California 1, the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). PCH and 101 frequently intertwine as they go north to south through California; however, PCH tries (and frequently succeeds) to be right along the coast.

The California coast tends to be fairly steep. In some areas, there is a shelf that supports a beach (such as Malibu and Santa Monica); in Northern California, that is generally not the case. The mountains run directly down into the water, and PCH twists along the edge of the mountain, usually 200 to 500 feet above the water. Teresa wanted to stop and walk on some of the amazing beaches we saw; however, it would have required rappelling to access the beach. Very remote, VERY beautiful, in a stark and wild fashion.

Every so often, the Coastal Highway would dip a bit lower and run through a redwood grove, then work its way back up the hill and provide beautiful vistas again. We followed PCH for a while, then cut east through a state park (and more redwood groves) towards 101. Once we hit 101, we turned south and completed the run back to San Francisco and our hotel.

Monday was Memorial Day and we were concerned about traffic. The usual route would have been to go a bit east, pick up I-5 South and go down the Central Valley to the LA area. Teresa and I decided to go down the Coastal Route (101 and/or 1), avoided traffic the entire day and ended up continuing the adventure, rather than “just driving”.

We cruised down 101 until PCH broke off and then followed PCH south.

Wow. I thought the Northern California PCH was rugged and beautiful: this section of the highway was more of both. Quite twisty and turny, but very impressive. We drove through Monterey (beautiful area) to Carmel.

Carmel would be a spectacular place to live. We ended up taking a very narrow side road that went down by the water through a residential area (see the pictures).

Once we left Carmel, it swiftly became uninhabited. There was a restaurant, “Rocky Point”, about 10 miles south of Carmel where we stopped for lunch. This was lucky in more than one way; the first way was that there were no more restaurants for QUITE a while.

http://www.rocky-point.com/ is their web site and the slide show is worth viewing. The restaurant sits on the side of a cliff with a rocky point that juts out into the Pacific. Not quite a bay or inlet, but there are points to both the north and south that shelter this area.

As we were seated, there was a fishing boat working its way North to South, maybe half a mile out from the shoreline. From what some of the locals were saying, it was working for squid.

Shortly after that, some sea lions swam by, then a large flight of brown pelicans.

Lunch was exceptional, and about half way through, Teresa pointed out to the ocean and asked what that white cap out in the middle was… turned out to be a grey whale, surfacing and browsing through the area (Teresa spotted it before anybody else in the restaurant, but everybody was soon whale watching). Impressive (although we couldn’t see much beyond the back of the whale as he was just coming up and spouting, then going back to eating). So, now we have seen a whale.

We worked our way south on the twisty road until we arrived at Big Sur. From the highway, this literally looks like a wide spot in the middle of the redwoods. It is probably 20 or 30 miles from “anywhere” and is absolutely beautiful. After pulling off the road (there are a variety of “tourist support stores”) and starting to look around, you begin to understand why it is so well known. It is out of the way but really amazing.

We continued south and left all traces of civilization (including power lines) behind, with the notable exception of PCH. This area is to the west of San Padres National Forest and it is noticeably UN-developed. Roads break off to the east (towards 101 from PCH) about every 20 miles or so, but calling them a “road” may be overstating things just a bit… they were asphalt where they turned off from PCH, but I would be surprised if they stayed that way. There was the winding road, the cliffs, beautiful views of the ocean (with occasional vista points) and occasional cars. Top speed was about 35 MPH, due to the nature of the road and the slowing to appreciate the views.

This stretch of the highway went on for about 45 miles, until we arrived at Lucia (preceded by about 5 miles of power lines). This is a town that is obviously supported by tourism, but it isn’t a “tacky tourist” area by any stretch. There are lots of restaurants and hotels, but spectacular ocean views are always a short walk away.

South of Lucia, the road was a lot easier to travel (back up to a cruising speed of about 50 mph or so). Then we passed by the entrance to Hurst Castle. We haven’t had a chance to go through Hurst Castle (yet) but it is supposed to be wonderful. We didn’t stop there, but about 5 miles down the road, we HAD to stop, at “Seal Beach”

Elephant Seals need to pull out of the water every so often and dry off and this is one of the places that they do it. We spent about 45 minutes watching the seals. None of the big males were there (they migrate and will show up later); they can be up to double the size of the juvenile males that show up in our pictures. Elephant seals are the “largest” of the seals in the world.

Noisy… these elephant seals are not sea lions that “bark”. These elephant seals *roared* and when the males were practicing mating fights, it got loud.

It was a really neat experience and one that I’m very glad we had.

After we left Seal Beach, we continued south to San Luis Opsipo (where Cal PolyTech is located) and made our way back to Thousand Oaks

It was truly a superlative weekend.