A Moment of Peace: A Minute Walk Through a Coast Redwood Forest

Give yourself a minute. Despite all the goings-on, despite all the noise, there are peaceful places and moments. Here is one minute of walking through a Coast Redwood forest in Northern California, the South Bull Creek Trail. No narration, no "learnin'", just walking. Enjoy a moment of peace! The geology blogging will resume shortly...

Travels in the Northern Hinterlands of California

The holiday season often means the special moments with family and decorations and Santa Claus, but when your family is spread out in a thin line running the entire length of the west coast of the United States, it also means some time on the road. We have had a long way to go in the past few days, but we stopped a few times and took in some of the extraordinary geography of California's isolated north coast.

Getting to the coast from our home in the Great Valley requires crossing the Coast Ranges first. Our preferred route is through the Clear Lake region. Clear Lake itself is a huge natural lake formed by lava flows and landslides that altered and blocked water course flowing into the Russian River. It covers 68 square miles, which makes it the largest natural lake entirely within California (Lake Tahoe is larger, but is partly in Nevada. The prominent peak on the lakeshore (above) is Mt. Konocti (4,721'), which is a potentially active volcano with eruptions as recent as 10,000 years ago. Hot springs and earthquakes attest to the continued existence of magma chambers in the region.

We reached the coast in the vicinity of Eureka and Arcata and headed north on Highway 101. We soon passed an incredible sight at Humboldt Lagoons State Park. The growth of hooked spits (long linear sand bars) has led to the formation of a series of baymouth bars which isolate the coastal estuaries from the open sea (there are no big rivers in the immediate area to flush out the sand. The bars are only a few hundred feet wide at most and one extends for three miles. There are a total of four lagoons.

The lagoons are a unique ecosystem. Because they are breached only on an irregular basis, salmon and other creatures have adapted in interesting ways. Young salmon migrate downstream to find their way to the sea blocked. They live in the lagoons for extra months or even years, gaining size that may enhance their chances of survival in the open sea. On the other hand, breeding salmon may have difficulty getting into the estuaries.

Soon we were deep into the Redwood forest. The Coast Redwood only grows along the coast of California and in a tiny part of southern Oregon. They are extraordinarily large with the giants reaching heights of nearly 400 feet. They are related to the Sequoias of the Sierra Nevada, and the Dawn Redwood of China (and ornamental landscapes). The Redwoods are the tallest, but the Sequoias have the greater bulk. The Redwoods make for excellent lumber, while the Sequoias do not. It was almost their undoing.

The Redwoods once existed as an unbroken forest from the Big Sur Coast to Oregon, topping out at some 2 million acres. More than 90% of the old-growth forests were cut down during the last century, and it was only through the foresight of the founders of Save the Redwoods and other organizations that old-growth groves were purchased and given over to the state of California for permanent protection from logging. As recognition grew of the need to preserve not just patches but entire ecosystems, Redwood National Park was established in 1968 and expanded in 1978. It protects an entire watershed (Redwood Creek) that has old-growth forests as well as second-growth tracts.

We didn't have very much time, but we stopped at Humboldt Redwoods State Park, and at the visitor center for Redwood National Park as we passed through. We hated to move on, but a storm was coming and our families were awaiting our arrival. One could spend weeks among these beautiful trees and the stunning coastline. Which we intend to do as soon as possible.

Notes From the Eclipse Trail (with apologies to Ken Burns)

{Note: This may not work right unless as you read you hear the voices narrating a Ken Burns documentary, like the Civil War, or Baseball...}

Dearest Ones...

It is August 20, 2017. I pray that our missive arrives intact from the hinterlands of the Oregon Territory. Our journey has been long and arduous, and the outcome remains a great uncertainty. As you no doubt recall, we left the familiar fields and cities of our Central Valley home a week ago, but the time might as well have been a year. We are tattered and dirty, but we remain resolute in our goal of witnessing a total Solar eclipse.

Our progress slowed as we entered the great forests of what the local inhabitants call the "Redwood Trees". The trees were immense, and the forest dark. It was hard at most times to even know the location of the Sun in the sky above. We pressed on, looking for some kind of shelter or inn that would take us in for a night. We found accommodation at an outpost called Albee Creek, in the deep forest of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. We found ourselves surrounded by wagons once known to us as VW Microbuses. It was an uncomfortable and worrisome night in the dark forests, as we listened to the sounds of men, beasts, and air-cooled four stroke engines.

We explored this strange new environment following the mere traces of human pathways, which we found to be covered with potholes and twisting and turning through the forest in confusing fashion. Navigation by the sun or the stars was well-nigh impossible, as we could not see them through the forest canopy above. We did our best with tattered maps provided by the local constabulary called "park brochures".

We have been set upon by the beasts of the forest, who seem to track our every move. The night was filled with the rustlings of animals large and small. There was the snap of branches, the snuffling of noses, and the munching sound of apples being consumed nearby. We even witnessed one of the behemoths high in an apple tree, stripping it of its bounteous fruit.

It was becoming clear to us that the eclipse would never be visible to us in the deep forests of Northern California, and so we set forth with few provisions and even less knowledge over the borders of the land called Oregon. At first little seemed to have changed, but as we continued further into the wilds, we saw that the inhabitants of the land of Oregon were different. As we stopped to refuel our conveyance, we were not allowed to handle the mechanism for pumping the petrol. It was done for us, but not out of human kindness. It was because of statutory decree. What kind of tyrant controls these poor inhabitants?

Still, we pressed on deeper into the land of Oregon. We realized that our hope of witnessing an eclipse would require more open lands, so we worked our way down to the coastline where the restless waves lashed at the solid rock in a mighty conflict. Eventually we arrived at a small village called Florence, where we found shelter with some of the locals. They are a kind people, and generous in their sharing of their meager resources of ribs and Chinese cuisine. We have benefited from their generosity and have regained strength for the journey ahead.

There are rumors passed around the local peoples of the days ahead of giant crowds, clogged highways, and high costs of parking. We fear for the future, yet we face it with a steadfastness that grows from our intense desire to see the incredible event high in the morning sky of August 21st. From our base camp, we sent an exploratory party in search of potential viewing sites, and there is a discovery of potential spots in the coastal areas with such names as Waldport, Seal Rock and Forfar. Our strategy and only hope for success is that we can arise before the sun itself and set out for these choice viewing localities. And so it shall be done, and only Providence knows whether success can be had.

As for myself, dear ones, I press on. I am covered with scrapes and bruises, as I may have misinterpreted the advice of the sages, and put on the eclipse glasses a bit soon. I have been walking into trees and walls at a horrendous rate and our medical supplies are running low.

But through our trials and troubles, the goal remains true and we hope attainable. It is known that no American can hope to see such a spectacle on American soil again before 2024, no matter their bravery and skill. We can only hope to press on with fortitude and stubbornness born of being earth scientists and astronomers.

Yeah, we'll let you know if we make it...

What do Bears Do in the Redwood Forest? They Eat Apples...

California is the only state whose state designated mammal is extinct. The last California Grizzly Bear died in the 1920s. But we do have bears, but they just aren't quite as terrifying as an angry Grizzly. The only bears native to California today are the Black Bears, a species found all across North America. Those in the east tend to actually be black in color, but out west there tends to be more variation, from black to almost blond.

It's usually terrifying for people to see a bear for the first time when they are out camping or hiking, but California bears are fairly benign. They got kind of a fearsome reputation as car destroyers in Yosemite Valley, but an intense effort by rangers to train tourists has largely brought the problem under control. The bears are certainly a nuisance in some environments where natural food is scarce (especially during the recent drought). But my understanding is that Black Bears haven't killed anyone in California in a century, although I'm always open to correction (I've heard of one or two deaths in Wyoming or Montana). We unfortunately kill bears instead, either on purpose or by accident. If you are driving in Yosemite National Park and see a temporary sign that says "Speeding kills bears", it means that a bear died at that spot.

I'm out on my last journey of the summer, headed towards Oregon hoping to see the eclipse, and we spent a few nights camping at Albee Creek in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It's a nice campground, too small for large RVs, and off the main highway. It's next to a meadow that was a homestead a century ago, and a large apple orchard still survives. The bears not too surprisingly love apples, and actually ignored the campground in favor of a few tasty treats from the apple trees. They've already stripped away the low-hanging fruit, so getting some required climbing into the trees. Most of the campers weren't even aware that there was a bear only a few hundred feet from their campsite. It was a pleasant way to spend the evening, watching bears be bears.


Yes, I got a bit of video too....

Vagabonding on Dangerous Ground: In This Land of the Sasquatch There are Ancient Giants

Yep, the first part of our journey into Dangerous Ground took us to the land of the Sasquatch, the legendary ape-human of the Pacific Northwest forests. That's not him in the picture above, although I could understand the misinterpretation. That's actually me taking a rare selfie at the Golden Gate Bridge. We were only an hour into our journey, and we had 200+ miles to go, but we couldn't resist being tourists for a moment. It was a wonderfully clear day in the Bay Area.

Our real goal was to reach a part of ancestral California, the Redwood forests. The original range of the trees extended from the Big Sur Coast to the Oregon border, but the wood is durable and therefore valuable. The forests were removed and only a few intact forests remain, with only about 5% of the old growth groves left. Thankfully they are mostly protected, but there is still a sense of great loss as we drive past mile upon mile of either barren slopes, or slopes covered with brush and sometimes young redwood trees. But often not.

These trees are the tallest in the world. There are rumors from the past of 400 foot tall trees of other species, but the claims date from more than a century ago, and these supposedly huge trees were cut down. I don't know if loggers exaggerate any more than other workers, but who knows? I'm pretty skeptical of the claims, and they can't be tested. The tallest Redwood is 379 feet (115 meters), and it was discovered only in 2006. There may still be taller ones out there.

There is really nothing quite like wandering through a mature forest of Redwood trees. The sun may be shining, but the light at ground level is more of a diffuse emerald green. Once the sun gets low, the forest becomes gray, and then pitch-black. I have a hard time imagining orienteering in places like this. Landmarks can be hard to come by.

Because we were vagabonding, i.e. not really planning far ahead, we stayed at Humboldt Redwoods State Park only because I was able to score a late cancellation. We got two nights. We explored the old growth forest along Bull Creek, and had a close look at one of the truly giant trees, which is called (by some degree of coincidence) "Giant Tree". It's only 16 feet short of being the tallest tree in the world, at 363 feet (110.6 meters). It towered over us.

It was gigantic, but from the ground it was difficult to see how tall it really was. You can see it in the photo below, just a bit right of center. The picture was possible only because the tree was near the edge of the grove. If it were in the middle of the grove, we could have walked right past it without realizing how it towered above the other trees.

This new series is called "on dangerous ground", but in this instance the danger was more to the trees than to us. We were inland, far from the dangers of tsunamis, but not far enough inland to be threatened by volcanic eruptions in the Cascades. Giant earthquakes have no doubt knocked a few of these trees over, but some of these ancient giants have survived five or six of the magnitude 9 tremors that have shaken the region in the last 2,000 years. No, the real danger is us, and what we've done to this ancient forest.

About that Sasquatch thing. Of course I believe that a race of gigantic ape-people have managed to survive and stay hidden in these deep forests, leaving behind no traces, no tools, and only revealing themselves to charlatans and book authors. Of course I believe. I also believe that the range of Sasquatch sightings happens to correspond pretty close to the range of the Black Bear, but no one could possibly mistake a seven-foot tall bear covered in dark fur in a dark forest with a seven-foot tall ape-human covered in dark fur in a dark forest. Especially if one believes hard enough.

But belief, no matter how fervently felt, doesn't prove much...

Geotripper Hallucinates in the Rainforest: Where are the rocks?

Archaeologists and geologists have it kind of tough in the rainforests. The people who lived here in past millennia utilized wood and bone most of the time in the making of their tools and habitations, and neither of those materials lasts for long in the wet acidic soils of a rainforest. Archaeologists don't have a lot of raw materials to work with. Likewise for the geologist, moisture and acid attack most rocks, turning them to clay in short order. The clay and soil coat the slopes, and the luxuriant plant growth hides almost all useful rock exposures. Actively eroding stream valleys and roadcuts are sometimes the only raw information a geologist has for mapping, and a lot of extrapolation must take place. No wonder I am more of a desert rat. I'm fundamentally lazy!

So I found myself hallucinating if you will during my travels in the past week through the rainforests of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. And no, I avoided the mushrooms! I started seeing rocks in the forest, but most people call this stuff wood. For instance, the natural arch above, in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park.

And this "limestone" cavern along the same trail? It had multiple passages and was big enough to crawl through, after all. It's gotta be a cave.

Rivers erode rock, right? So how about this ridge across Bull Creek in Humboldt Redwoods State Park in the above photo? Upturned metamorphic rock, surely? It was softer than most rocks for some reason.

And isn't this a fold in metamorphic rock, along the Hoh Rainforest Hall of Mosses Trail? Surely this stuff isn't all wood?

At the end of my musings, I realized I was acting just a bit like a kid again. This kind of place would have been endlessly fascinating to me as a child. I know this because once in a great while, the child re-emerges and imagines all kinds of strange things. Crawling under tree trunks isn't quite as easy as it once was, though.

I'll get back to some real geology before long! There are actually rocks to be seen out here, and some of them are truly spectacular. Mrs. Geotripper and I have been having a great time doing something we haven't done in a number of years, just vagabonding from one place to another without a plan, other than a vague goal of seeing some parts of British Columbia that we missed on our field trip last year because of bad weather. I'm happy to say we've been mostly successful.

Rain? In a Rain Forest? Exploring California and Oregon on the 50th Anniversary of the Biggest Flood Ever

Humboldt Redwoods State Park, California

It starts with little cascades like this...

Humboldt Redwoods State Park

That grow into brooks like this, repeated thousands of times over...

Prairie Creek, Redwood National Park, CA

Which leads to this...

Prairie Creek Elk viewing area, Redwood National Park

Our Christmas travels took us into the northwest of California and into Oregon, and as luck would have it, we drove right into a continuation of the storms that have been pounding the west coast this month. At home, we've already received more precipitation than all of last year's horrific drought totals. As we drove north on Highway 101, we watched the rain falling for hours, and soon, every waterway was filled with muddy water. It may be the first truly cleansing flows these channels have had in some time.

Eel River at Phillipsville

I don't think any records are in danger of being broken, but with the anemic levels of precipitation over the last three years, it was nice to see these rivers brimming with water. Now that I have access to some data, I am finding some impressive numbers stacking up. The Klamath River is flowing at 95,500 cubic feet per second, 961% of normal daily flow for this time of year. The Smith River reached 65,000 cfs for awhile (about 20 times normal), and Redwood Creek was around 11,900 cfs, about ten times normal.

Eel River, CA

The ultimate for our day was the Umpqua River near Roseburg, Oregon. Just downstream at Elkton, it is flowing at 131,000 cfs, a bit above flood stage. Compare to three or four days ago when it was flowing at about 5,000 cfs.

Umpqua River at Roseburg, Oregon

Umpqua River at Roseburg, Oregon

 A year ago at this time, the river was pretty much a pool...

Here is how hydrologists see these rivers, with a graph that shows the discharge (cubic feet per second) over a week's time. The effect of the latest storms is clear.
 

The water flows will undoubtably drop off over the next few days, but it is impressive to see what the rivers can do. Today is the 50th anniversary of the worst floods ever in the region, the 1964 Christmas Floods. In that flood there had been a cold snap where a great deal of snow had accumulated and the ground was frozen. Then, over several days around Christmas, a Pineapple Express storm dropped prodigious amounts of rain, which melted the snow, but did not melt the soil, so little of the rain was absorbed into the ground. Around three dozen people were killed, and several dozen villages were completely erased. Many dozens of bridges were destroyed, and numerous other towns were cut off for weeks.

Compare the numbers:

Klamath River today, 95,500 cfs, in 1964, 565,000 cfs.
Eel River today, 40,000 cfs, in 1964, 750,000 cfs.
Rogue River (Oregon) today: 23,500, in 1964, 200,000 cfs.

By some estimates, such a flood is estimated to happen maybe once in a thousand years.

Whither Go the Redwoods? Smoke in the Temperate Rainforest

Our long journey through western Canada and the Pacific Northwest ended a few days ago, but we lingered in Oregon and Northern California for a few days to visit family, and frankly, to avoid the heat wave that seemed to engulf the southwest and interior valleys. Our route took us down the Oregon coast and into California at Crescent City and Fortuna, and then into the incredible Redwood forest.

Something was off...

The sunlight just wasn't "right". It was as if someone had put a dimmer switch on. Everything looked the way it was supposed to, but there was sort of an orange-brown glow. The shadows were bluish. We had heard vague reports about fires burning across the west, but we couldn't see any obvious smoke plumes. But the smoke was there.

The forest was stunningly beautiful, though. We had a long road ahead of us that day, but we couldn't help but linger through the early afternoon. The Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is an ancient species with a heritage that extends back into the era of the dinosaurs. They were once widespread across the northern hemisphere, but the ice ages restricted their range and now they exist only in a narrow coastal strip from the Big Sur coast to the Oregon border region.

The trees require moist temperate conditions, with plentiful winter rains, and summer coastal fogs. As we wandered through the coastal temperate rainforest, we noticed something disquieting: it wasn't moist. It was very dry.

The understory was green, and the shade was cool, but there was none of the dampness that I associate with these forests. My perceptions were confirmed when we stopped in at the visitor center for Humboldt Redwoods State Park. The rainfall for the 2013-2014 water year was an astounding 27.96 inches. In the Central Valley where I live, that much precipitation would be astounding, but here in the rainforest, it's scary. A display offered the rain totals for the last 70 years, and in all that time, only once before has the yearly total been less than 40 inches.

Once.

The average yearly rainfall is around 60 inches, and four times the totals have exceeded 100. But this year is the second driest ever at Humboldt, and in most of the state it is the driest year ever recorded. We are in the grip of a horrific drought, and there are no signs that it is going to break soon.

We are witnessing and living through huge changes in the climate regime we tend to regard as stable and constant. Glaciers worldwide are receding, snowfall totals in our Sierra are declining. We are unaware on a daily basis unless there is an unusual heatwave or extended drought like the one we are experiencing now. But the changes are happening. The summer fogs are not as common as they once were. Temperatures are warming. Sea level is rising.

And the fires are burning. In places the climate has changed so much that when the vegetation returns, it will be different than what was burned away. Wildlife species are moving uphill to escape warming conditions, and some are disappearing because they can no longer move upwards.

It may be that in a few decades or centuries, California's state tree will only be able to grow in Oregon or Washington. We've cut down 96% of the original old growth Redwood forests, and now climate change may very well take care of the rest. 

I'm praying for a break in the drought this year. But I'm also hoping that those who govern us will finally come to terms with the huge threats that global climate change presents. Money still does all the talking in politics, and the money says to protect the status quo. We need people of vision, not political hacks who look out for their financial benefactors. I'm hoping, but I'm not hopeful.

Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) at Humboldt Redwoods

There are lots of beings who depend on us. There are the animals and plants, of course, but there are also our children and grandchildren. What world will we leave to them?