West Ridge Loop: Redwood National Park

 

Sometimes you get more adventure than you were counting on. This is why it is helpful to pack for the adventure that you don’t expect to have. I mean, you don’t bring that extra pair of socks because you PLAN to have to cross a river that the Ranger didn’t tell you was missing the “seasonal” bridge. You pack the extra socks just in case you need extra socks. If you know about the bridge, the socks are not extra.

Wow. So. Here we are, safe and sound and dry in our little 13 foot Scamp camper in the middle of the Redwood National (and State) park. We have a quaint little campsite (no utilities) in the rather small Elk Prairie campground. I have never been to the Redwoods in Northern California before and I wasn’t really expecting the grandeur and quantity of magnificent trees that we found here. I have been to other Redwood groves and places around California and the usual thing is that you drive or walk down a given road and you get to the grove where the 40 or 50 trees are growing, along with 10 or so really really big  trees. Here, we look behind our campsite. We take the little trail through the woods beside the main road that goes the quarter mile from our campsite to the Park Information Center. The Trees are everywhere. They are huge, unique, beautiful, and older than western civilization (yes, even older than some buildings in Paris). 

Trees around our campsite

We went to the Information Center the day before our hike to talk to the Ranger about what sort of hikes we should try. We had been given advice from the guy at the Crescent City Information Center to do the Fern Canyon hike from Elk Prairie to the coast. It sounded really great to us but the local guys informed us that it was a 10 mile round trip and there would probably be deep creeks to ford. We decided not to do that hike. They did recommend a 6 mile loop hike that would take us through “Trees bigger than people would see if they stopped at Big Tree”. Big Tree is evidently not a tree but a sort of big rest stop where, historically, people would stop on their way north from San Francisco to Portland or Seattle. We are talking before Interstates. Before the completion of Highway 101. Model T’s. Like that.

The Redwood State and National parks are a conglomerate of California State and United States Park Service Land, they have individual park names but they all sort of abut each other and many of their facilities are managed jointly. For instance, there is no open camping in any of this park area and to reserve a campsite you need to go through one reservation system. During off season you probably don’t need a reservation as there are often First Come First Serve sites available. Strangely to me (or perhaps to any Oregonian) is that none of the sites have any utilities. No Electric, Water, or Sewer in the individual campsites. There are pretty nice (heated, flushing) bathrooms and showers and freshwater available from public taps. There are also big metal bear boxes in each individual camping site. 

Prairie Creek Right Behind our Campsite

Elk Prairie

It was sort of wet

Our campsite, the second night we were here, was right on the little river that runs through this park and after which the park is named: Prairie Creek. The Prairie in this case is a big open field out by the road (excuse me, the ‘parkway’) where deer and Elk are often seen. 

I must go into this later, but I will say that when one is staying in a RV (in our case a little Scamp trailer) and the weather is cold and wet, one doesn’t really enjoy the splendor of the campsite as much as one might if one were in a tent and so huddled around a fire in the morning. Of course, one might not enjoy the outside at all if one was cold and wet and misserable and having trouble getting the fire lit and the coffee made. Trade-offs.

We had talked to the Ranger yesterday afternoon and asked about what trails from here would be within our capabilities and show us some good trees. Perhaps a trail that went through that Big Tree place. He told us that we would see bigger trees that at Big Tree in just about any trail that we walked around the campground. Big Tree is handy for people passing through because it has a large parking lot and a bathroom. And a big sign that says Big Tree.

He recommended a 6 mile loop (perhaps he listed it as 6.6 mileas) starting at the Information Center and going North first on the West side of the valley defined by Prairie Creek along the ridge and then down zig zagging down to the trail that follows Prairie Creek and then finally to a trail named after an old dead white guy. These trails were named 1) West Ridge 2) Zig Zag 3) Prairie Creek 4) KK (which stands for something that I can’t remember. Perhaps Karl)

It had been raining off and on all night but not so cold out. We chose a time when the rain had stopped and convinced ourselves that it was ‘over’, put on our rain gear, and set off to find West Ridge Trail.  This isn’t too hard. The trails are well marked. The difficulty is in walking at all when your head is crained up to stare at these Giant Fraking Trees. I mean, they are everywhere. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a GFT.  They have been out there living for a millennia (I mean, literally 1000 years) (and I mean literally literally) and during that time they have taken their share of random hits. So they have scars. Damage from a fallen brother that struck them and took off a big chunk about the time that Magellan was sailing around the world. The fallen brother is gone to loam, but the injured tree has healed and now has some huge beautiful woody scar that is sitting up 50 feet in the air, growing ferns and moss and looking like some Ent face. 

The natural growth cycle of the Redwoods leads them to spring up around ‘Mom’. So you see many places where there are 5 to 10 giants that are forming so tight an association as to appear at the base to be one tree. Perhaps you can see the remains of old dead Mom still sticking up a eerie skeletal stump from the center of the cluster. 

The trail starts out with a nice old bridge over the creek and then winds away for a while with easy walking that wanders through the old trees. Once you hit the West Ridge trail sign and turn north things get a little harder. The trail is on switch backs going up the hill and though the elevation change is not great (perhaps 800 feet) it is constantly up. Also the trail is sort of strange in many places. The Trees have taken over the entire forest, even where they are not standing their roots extend. So the trail is over top of the roots. Many hikers footsteps have polished these roots such that, even though it is not muddy, the trail is a bit slippery in the rain.  The trail is also often canted. I believe this is because workers cannot level the trail without cutting into the root system. So you get some patches of the trail that are canted and rooted and slippery in the rain. Did I mention that it is raining? It started raining on us pretty much as we set foot on the West Ridge Trail and it did not stop. It wasn’t a hard rain, must continuous. And the big trees would catch the little drops and conglomerate them into big drops that would fall down to us. So it wasn’t that we were caught in any downpour but more that we were subjected to death by 1000 drips. We have good rain gear, however, GoreTex jackets and good rain pants. We also put our rain covers on our packs to keep our back-up equipment dry. 

In this rain and cold, we are not seeing any fauna. No birds or mammals crossed our path during this part of the hike. The Flora, on the other hand, if pretty green and happy in this rain. The Big Trees domniate, of course, but there are places where I see a couple of sitka or Douglass Fir. On the ground is lots of plants found in Oregon (which is just north of here, after all) like Sword Fern, Deer Fern, and (a special treat for the first few days of spring) fresh blooming Trillium. Lots of moss. 

Every Quarter mile or so we would run into a Grove of Big Trees. Yes, I did use a lot of capital letters. Those Groves of Trees deserve them. I mean, these are just a few of thousands of groves in this part of the park, but each one is stupendous. Each one makes you set you hat back further on your head so you can look up high enough to see the top of this things, way the hell up there. I feel inadequate to describe these forest leviathan with my words. I had been hoping the pictures I took would capture some of the wonder but I find that they don’t really show the scale very well. But take a gander anyway.

I have found that I am becoming more and more untrusting of Map distance statements. Either that or Fit Bit and Gaia are teaming up. I say this because the Ranger told us we were going on a 6 mile hike and at the Gaia and Fit Bit 4 mile mark we still were not at the halfway turning point yet. I admit we were slowed a little by the gawking at Giants. And the sudden down pour and hail may have distracted us for a bit. And OK, perhaps we are not back into spring fighting shape yet after a long dark wet winter, but Still, Gaia and FitBit said 4 miles. And there was the trail sign for the turn onto the next Trail in the loop. Zig Zag #1.  And down we went.

Nurse Log

Now we come to our first big adventure on this hike. Halfway down the .5 file mile ZigZag (which I swear was at least 2 miles) we come to a tree that has very recently (last 48 hours) fallen across our path. Just think about that, this tree has been waiting for 1000 years just so it could fall at the best time to impeded my journey and give me some added adventure. 

Usually when a tree is in your path it is a tree. Not a Tree. This one may even have been a Doug Fir instead of a redwood, but it was still 5 foot in diameter and completely blocking the path. It didn’t look like we could go around it either uphill or down, the slope was too steep. We couldn’t fit under either. That left either going over or restracing our steps back to camp. Bah.  Over we go. The tree was too big to throw a leg over, so I sort of jumped up and put my stomach over the top and then turned my entire body so as to get my leg over. Now I am lying face down on the very large and wet tree trunk and holding on as I scrunch over and slowly lower my legs down till I touch on the other side. I must say that my new Rain Coat from LL Bean held up rather well. And It did get scratched around on the bark a lot. Better it than me…. My Partner came over next. She is a bit shorter than me but still managed to pull herself up onto the log with the help of some surrounding vegetation. 

OK. Now we  are over it and really wet. 

When we got to the bottom of Zig Zag #1, I thought we would reach a spot where we would have access to the main road (the Parkway). I was wrong. We did hit the Prairie Creek Trail, however, and so we were following that. The sign assured us that we only had 3 miles left to go before getting back to the missinformation Center. As you might imagine, this trail follows the creek which means we are winding around a lot not only with the creek but also in and around other groves of big trees. There are a lot of trees down in the area. Big Trees coming down with big violence. When they hit they tear down other trees, gouge huge holes in the ground and splinter apart explosively. Some fallen trees looked like they had been hit by mortar fire, huge splinters and planks thrown dozen of feet. Later on the hike we saw one that had fallen on the parkway in the last week or two. There was a 16 foot stack of broken up wood that had been shoved aside by some large bulldozer and a 2 foot deep hole in the road where the tree had hit.  Ah, but we haven’t made it to the road yet.

Ent

We crossed one little bridge over Prairie Creek and we were within 30 feet of the road (saw a car go by) but there wasn’t a trail there and the thicket was…. Well, thick. Is that why it is called a thicket? Perhaps it was originally thickette?

Anyway. We are hiking along, making good time now on this flat and realitvely open trail and I look down to the ground from the trees and I see….. a dissembled bridge sitting on the side of the trail. Oh, this cannot be good. I was thinking it was a seasonal bridge over the creek for some side trail. I was half right. Another 50 feet and we came to a side creek. A tributary. But a pretty wide tributary and currently running fast and sort of deep with all of the rain. And no bridge. I mean, you could see where the bridge was supposed to go, but it was in pieces behind us. I believe was I said was, “Well Fuck”.

Hey Mr. Ranger. Do you have any suggestions for a good hike. This 6 mile loop here? Well gee, I can’t expect you to know about every tree that may have come down in the last 24 hours, but I am betting that you would know about and have told me about any seasonal bridges that haven’t been put back into place for the year. Sure you would. Next time I will specifically ask:

1) Do you know of any obstacles that might deter a 66 year old man from going on this trail?

2) Any Trees Down?

3) Any Bridges Out?

4) Any infestations with brain eating Zombies?

5) How dated is your information? When did you last talk to someone that did this hike? Could they have been recently infected?

So…. We stood there and stared at the river for awhile. It wasn’t like it was going to be impossible to get across. Hell, it was going to be easy to get across. We were just going to get our feet wet. And then we would have to hike the remaining 2 miles in wet feet. Plus, we now didn’t know how many other “Seasonal Bridges” were not in place on this trail. I mean, if there was one that wasn’t in, then they were probably all not in. But which bridges were seasonal? The map showed 3 more crossings. Gaia said we had already gone 6 miles and had no comment about the existence of bridges. Now we get down to being prepared. Paige and I both had dry socks in our packs. Sigh. One Pair of dry socks. We don’t know how far back on the trail we have to go to access the road (where we know the bridge is in place because we crossed it yesterday in the car). We decide to ford the Creek and see what happens. As it turned out, her boots are a little higher than mine and she crossed with dry feet. I was swamped and had to get out my dry socks. And then I was only sort of swamped. Soggy.  The trail to the road was just on the other side of the river, so we hiked out to it and followed the road back to the disinformation center, where we had a talk with the guy that recommended the hike. “Oh, of course the bridge wasn’t in place. They are seasonal”. Fuck you.  (OK, most of that conversation was in my head, and the guy was trying to be helpful and friendly. Perhaps one should know that if one hikes in the late winter one will get ones socks wet)

In Truth, though it was a challenging hike, it was a lovely and truly awesome hike. I would do it again anytime. Well, once I have been into town to get all of my socks and gear dried. Did you know it is virtually impossible to get anything dry in a 13 foot trailer during a rain storm? You are lucky if you can keep your bedding dry. Hey, I have decided to start a new blog. It is going to be all about camping in 13 foot trailers. I will leave a link below to the first entry, just because I know you want to read it.