It’s an understatement to say that the California Redwoods are large trees. They’re huge. Massive. Enormous. Mighty. No picture I’ve ever seen or taken will do justice to the experience of actually being there. It’s something everyone, especially those from the flat lands of the midwestern prairie, should experience for themselves.
We hiked several miles on a number of trails that wound through the del Norte Redwoods. I’ve never seen such a thriving, lush forest in all my life. Dense forest surrounded every trail and in most cases you had no idea where you were headed or where you had been. Redwoods stretched upwards into the cloudy morning mist making them appear endless. The forest floor was carpeted with ferns, young sprouts, broad leaf clover and moss. We observed fallen redwood trunks (possibly hundreds of years old) with mature redwood trees growing right out of the bark. In some cases the roots would eerily finger down several feet to gain a fertile foothold. The only thing that was not green with growth was the crushed gravel path we walked on. We also observed several living redwoods that had ashen black burns on portions of their trunks. I doubt that these singed trees were the victims of selective arson, but lightning strikes due to their extreme heights.
Any fallen Redwood that crossed the trail was obviously carved or cut away by park rangers. Being able to see the diameter of some of these tree trunks really put into perspective just how large they really are. Unreal.