Redwood National Park & Humboldt Redwoods State Park, California, June 2014

Hiking the Redwoods in Northern California, a Road Scholar Program

Map of Northern California Coast.

Click on the map above to see a larger version.  (Google Maps)

In the second week of June we attended our first Road Scholar Program, Hiking the Redwoods in Northern California, coordinated and hosted by Carol and Lynn Unser, owners of Coastal Journeys Unlimited, Inc.  Lynn is a 5th generation Oregonian and a former logger and fisherman; he had numerous colorful and educational stories to tell of the old days of logging.  Carol was a wealth of knowledge too; she came from a background in academia teaching archeology, paleontology, and coastal natural history at various institutions in Georgia and Oregon.  The other instructors were Joseph Calbreath, a climatologist and meteorologist from Eugene, Jenny Hanson and Jerry and Gisela Rohde, local naturalists and historians, all very experienced, and I might add, excellent, Road Scholar instructors.

Our base of operations was Eureka where we stayed at the Red Lion Hotel, that proved to be quite comfortable.  We were on Lynn and Carol's bus each morning at 8:30 for the first hike of the day.  At noon, more or less, we had a nice sandwich lunch before we headed out for the afternoon's walk.  One day we had a special lunch at a seafood restaurant in Trinidad.  In the late afternoon we returned to the hotel in time to clean up a bit and, for some of us, a quick stop by the bar on the way to the conference room where dinner was served.  In the evenings there were presentations by Jenny Hanson on the redwood forest natural and cultural history and the Humboldt Wildlife Care Center on its work to recuperate injured animals and return them to the wild.  The first night we had dinner at the historic Samoa Cookhouse in Samoa across Humboldt Bay from Eureka.

We drove up the day before in order to explore Eureka and its environs, including the little Victorian town of Ferndale.  To our surprise the day we arrived was their monthly art festival in Old Town Eureka.  So after dinner we wondered about the shops and enjoyed the music.

We then spent the next four days in the sage hands of our instructors visiting the redwood parks exploring the old growth forests of the Coast Redwood (Sequoia Sempervirens).   We also spent one morning at the Lanphere Dunes at the north end of Humboldt Bay to see the results of years of work to restore to the dunes their native ecology.

We then drove down to Fort Bragg for two days and, on our way, stopped to walk a couple of additional trails along the Avenue of the Giants.

The sites we visited are plotted on the map to the left that I modified from Google.  (Click on the map to see a larger version.)

Please enjoy the pictures below.  To see the full image, click on a thumbnail.  To navigate through the images, click on NEXT or PREV to move to the next image or to go back.

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