Tom's National Park Adventure

I spent the day surrounded by giants. Amazing, impressive, awe inspiring, titanic, huge, spiritual, unbelievable……. Go ahead and pick an adjective…… they all come up short of trying to explain the majesty of these trees!

If you stand beneath one and start to look up, you have to raise your head as high as you can, then you have to arch your back and keep looking up. When you finally feel like you are going to fall backwards….. then and only then can you see the top of them!

The coastal Redwood trees are over 350 feet tall! That’s as tall as a 35 story building!

The base of these old growth trees are over 20 feet in diameter.

I was walking around today in forests that have trees in them that are over 1000 years old. they are some of the oldest living things on the planet!

This part of the world gets a lot of rain. Up to 200 inches in just four or five months of the year. The mild climate and lots of rain makes a perfect environment for these trees to flourish.

The bark of the trees is extremely thick. Some six to eight inches. It is also very resistant to fire and rot. The trees do eventually die. Because they are close to the coast and are so tall, wind can push them over. You would think that the root systems for trees this big would have to grow extremely deep in order to hold them up. The reality is that their roots are very shallow. Because there are so many of these trees, the roots intertwine with the roots from the other trees and form a kind of woven network where they all work together to hold the trees in place!

Fire has and will play a role in these forests. Most of these mammoth trees have evidence of fire damage on them. There is no way of knowing when that damage occurred. It could have been from a fire over 300 years ago.

When these trees do fall down they land with such force that the trees kind of blow apart on impact. The wood comes apart in big planks. The native Americans who have lived here made their homes out of these planks.

It takes about as long for the tree to decay as it took for the tree to grow. So all the downed trees that you see while in these old growth groves will be here for a very long time to come!

I drove around and hiked in several different groves today.

The biggest tree I saw today was “The Boy Scout Tree”

One of the roads I was on was the Holland Hill Road. It is a gravel road that winds through the big trees. It was originally an old stage coach road!