This morning we decided to go all in on redwoods. Bob has an old photo of his parents driving through a carved out tree, so when he saw that there is a huge redwood in nearby Klamath that you can drive through that was his number one stop. We did indeed eek through with his Camry, didn’t even have to tuck in the windows.

We passed through a clearing labeled Elk Meadows and it was full of… elk! I guess the elk can read signs lol.

Heading south we took the Newton B Drury Scenic Parkway through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. There are multiple redwoods state parks on the northern CA coast and they are all jointly operated with Redwoods National Park. We stopped to hike the Prairie Creek Trail, meandering among ginormous thousand plus year old trees along a crystal clear stream.

We again had the place to ourselves, alone in the company of these giants who have seen so many lives pass through. Imagine, a living tree that was a sapling in year 700 AD.

After a picnic at the visitors center we decided to drive a bit further to Gold Bluffs Beach. This required taking narrow unpaved Davison Rd that curved and dipped downward to sea level. I thought we’d seen magical forest, but this was another level of magic. We were alone in this silence, the narrow road curving between the bases of giant trees, the sun beaming slantwise through the mist in the branches. I would not have been surprised to hear the cry of a dinosaur, or see a yeti passing by. It felt a world apart.

The beach was broad and foggy and empty of humans. Bob shuffled a “happy birthday” to me in the wet sand, soon to wash away in the incoming tide.

At the beach we were aiming for a little hike in Fern Canyon, a steep walled slot grown thick with ferns. But after Gold Bluffs Beach (the golden hued walls of the cliffs really do contain gold!), there was a sign “creek crossing ahead” and a wide pond appeared, completely covering the road! The ranger who suggested this hike said nothing about fording water, and we were not going to test the limits of Bob’s Camry this day. I love slot canyons and was disappointed to miss this one.

We retraced our route and ended up back in Crescent City for the last moments of crossing to the lighthouse before the tide was too high.

In fact, coming back across the tidepools we had to time our transit between the waves! I made good on my agate search plans and left with a handful of pretty little stones. Exhausted and satisfied, we called it a day.