Harris Beach State Park, Oregon June 26-29

We are finally back in the land of Verizon aircard signals so I will update you on what we have been doing for the last 10 days!

We stayed at Harris Beach State Park four nights. The park is located a few miles north of Brookings, Oregon which, just north of the Oregon/California border. Our site had an ocean view, but the last few days we were there, the haze prevented us from seeing too much.We decided to geocache our way through Redwoods National Park in northern California. We found several caches along US 101 on our way to California. Our first stop in California was Jedediah Smith State and Redwoods National Park information center. We wanted to know which trails were good for quick hikes through the Redwoods. Bob knew 2 of our caches were located in the Redwoods. As usual, the rangers were very helpful. They gave us excellent directions to Stout Grove which is located on an old stage coach road.

The coastal redwoods are massive! We visited Sequoia National Park in central California back in 1980. The sequoia redwoods are larger in circumference than the coastal redwoods, but the coastal redwoods are the tallest living thing I know about--over 340 feet tall! We tried to get pictures to show you just how enormous they can be. We couldn't get a picture from top to bottom, they were just too tall.

When you stand next to one, you feel like a dwarf.

The trees have cones, but for such large trees, the seed cones are very small!

Not all coastal redwoods grow from seeds, most grow from root collar burls--big, gnarly knots usually near the root of the tree. Sometimes trees that start from burls grow together in families. Here is a family of four trees.
Some of the trees have been dated as being over 3000 years old! This one didn't make it that long, but you can see how big the trunk is from this picture. Bob is standing near the middle of the fallen tree.

Looking to Bob's left down the remainder of the trunk you can see all the plants using the downed tree for nourishment.
We left Stout Grove to cross the bridge to Jedediah State Park. The Smith River runs through the park. Many people were enjoying the water and the sun on the day we were there.

From Redwoods National Park we continued on the one lane stage coach road into Crescent City, California. Our next cache was at a lighthouse. Battery Point Lighthouse is still operational and the keeper lives in the house.
You can visit this lighthouse during the day, but only at low tide! The walkway is underwater when the tide is high. We were standing on the rocks of the walkway looking at tide pools.

We returned to our campsite and made plans to geocache another day, another place!

We discovered that Oregon has redwoods, too! We drove east of Brookings and found a forest service road. The Redwood Nature Trail was located there--as well as a geocache!

There was a small waterfall at the beginning of the trail.

There were several bridges along the trail.

The switchbacks along the trail made it difficult to navigate with the GPS, but we finally found the cache in back of a huge tree that had burned.

We enjoyed our time at Harris Beach. We shopped for souvenirs, groceries, and just had a good time! We wished we could stay longer, but the park was packed and the spaces were reserved through the 4th of July weekend. We needed to find a campsite somewhere where we could stay through the 4th!

We packed our belongings, topped the rv with gas (much cheaper in Oregon $4.35 to $4.75 in Calif.), and headed into California on Monday, June 30. That is where we lost our Verizon aircard signal! The redwoods gave too much cover for signals to get through!