What a difference a mountain makes.

Today I was going to see one of the main items on my to do list - The Redwood trees in the Redwood National park.

Had a good breakfast of porridge (called oatmeal here) with brown sugar and sultanas followed by an English muffin, orange juice and coffee. This was served in the Flying Gull restaurant where I had eaten last night – some of the same waitresses were working again.

About ten minutes along the road I had to stop at a checkpoint. This was the state line into California where I was asked how much fruit and vegetables I was carrying (not even a banana today), given a map of California and was on my way again. Filled up at a pre-pay petrol station (once the attendant had told it was pre-pay!)

On the road and heading along the coast, there was lots of similar scenery but you cannot be bored with such interesting topography. This would be a great place for a school geography trip! The visitor centre I had picked out was inaccessible as the access road was closed so I went on to the smaller Elk camping site visitor centre and took a short hike from there.

Redwoods

It is only when you walk among these trees that you really get a good sense of their size; photographs don’t do them justice. It is hard to estimate how tall they are but they just seem to go on forever. The forest (like the Hoh Rain forest) is very old so there a lots of fallen trees. One in particular did not seem a truly massive tree compared to those standing but I could barely reach the top of the fallen trunk when on tip toe. See picture below .

Taller than me

The trail I took lead back to the visitor centre after about 40 minutes so I took a final look around then headed off as there was still some 170 miles to go. Carried on down Highway 101, as I had been doing since Wednesday, but then had to turn inland onto Highway 299. This cuts right through, or rather over, the Cascade mountains and is a remote, winding, roller coaster of a road. It rises to 3000 feet at its highest. At about 3 P.M. the rain actually stopped for a while and the scenery was dramatically different as I was now in the valley of the Trinity river.

Trinity River

The final descent out of the mountains was even more fun as the bends and dips just kept coming at me. Then it was just a few more miles into my stop for the night at Redding. The Shasta mountains were dramatically in view in the distance (it was nice to have a distant view) and the temperature was really warm as I got out of the car. A very different climate to the one I had left at the coast.

Tomorrow, Nevada (briefly).