Welcome to WaterWorld

To bring you up to date,  we left the Enterprise in California and flew back to the East Coast,  just in time for Hurricane Sandy -- perfect timing!  Our power was out for four days, but the good news was that after innumerable power outages over the past four years in our present house, we installed a natural gas-powered generator last year and it came through with flying colors.  We had heat, some light, and a functioning refrigerator.

And I'm still traveling with Cherie,  but now we're in Europe for two weeks.  First stop was Venice, pictured above.  Venice took me completely by surprise.  Sure, I had heard all about the canals, but lots of cities have canals.  Such as Birmingham, England for example, where I was stranded for the better part of a week by 9/11.  So what's the big deal with Venice?  The big deal is that Venice has only canals.  No roads.  Ergo no cars, no trucks, no buses, no motorcycles, no streetcars, no subways.  You either take a boat or walk.  But what about the ubiquitous Italian motorscooters?  They don't work either, because every 50 yards or so you have to cross one of the 177 canals.  And all of the 409 bridges were built centuries ago, and they all have steps.  Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly.  There is a causeway from the mainland to one of the 118 small islands on which the city is built.  But from there, it's all waterway.

Here is another amazing thing.  The foundations of all the buildings rest on wooden pilings made from millions (literally) of small trees which were driven through the mud and into the underlying clay.  Some of these buildings are pretty big -- we're talking about a lot of weight here.  So how is this possible?  Why haven't the pilings rotted out over the centuries?  Well, it seems that the bacteria that actually do the rotting are aerobic, and the pilings are not exposed to the air.  So instead of rotting, they have actually petrified.  As our walking tour guide put it, Venice rests on the world's largest petrified forest.  As you might imagine, building in this environment presents some issues, so maybe this is why in addition to being saved from vehicles,  the city has also been spared a lot of new construction.  Most of the buildings are old, and some are quite old.  All of this results in a unique, amazingly quaint, and very beautiful place.  Here are some additional photos.

But why go to all the trouble of building a city in the middle of a lagoon?  For the same reason that people went to all the trouble of building towns with high walls on top of very steep hills.  All those large stones were hauled up those steep hills without the aid of any modern machinery -- essentially by hand.  That's a mind-boggling amount of extra work compared with building that hill town down in the valley, or building Venice on dry land.   And they didn't do all that extra work just for the bragging rights.  They did it to defend themselves.  Which leads us to our next commercial break.

So, what were they defending against?  Wild boar?  Bull elephants?  No, unfortunately it was just other people.  People who wanted to rob and kill them.  We humans are unique among the inhabitants of the Earth in many ways, and one of the more prominent of those ways is our predilection for killing each other.  This is the ultimate manifestation of a human characteristic which, as far as I can see, seems to be universal.  I call it the "us vs. them" syndrome, or UVT for short.  The essence of UVT was captured some years ago by Tom Lehrer in his famous song,  National Brotherhood Week.

I touched on UVT in a previous post, but perhaps a small elaboration is in order here.  Because of its universality across cultures as Tom so brilliantly points out,  the suspicion arises that UVT is genetic, just like its cousin, PTB.  But if it is, it should confer some evolutionary advantage.  So what could possibly be advantageous about disliking other people, often to the point of wanting to kill them?  Well, in the first place, UVT promotes war, and war has provided the stimulus for a vast amount of scientific and technological innovation, from gunpowder to atomic energy to the internet (created by DARPA -- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

But that's really just the tip of the iceberg.  Evolution is all about the survival of the fittest.  Here's a typical scenario:  One of our distant ancestors happens to be born with a genetic mutation which makes him a bit bigger and stronger than normal.  After some generations have passed, his descendants who have inherited this gene manage to survive some natural disaster which has killed most of the nearby tribe who don't have it.  Fine, but notice that the human race had to wait around for the appropriate natural events to occur in order for this gene to become widespread.   However with UVT, there's no need to wait.  The bigger and stronger guys can proceed immediately to kill their weaker neighbors.  So the real value of UVT is that it accelerates the process of natural selection.  

There are other advantages as well.  Such as population control.  No need to wait for a plague, flood, or drought.  But there's a problem here.  As is the case with many good things, too much is no longer good and may sometimes be catastrophically bad.  If UVT succeeds in starting World War III, the population problem could be permanently solved.  Forever.

Cascade Lakes

Back in the early to mid '90s, my extended family (sisters and cousins and aunts -- literally) held several family vacations at Black Butte Ranch,  an upscale resort near the town of Sisters, Oregon.  So Cherie and I knew how beautiful the central Oregon Cascades are and wanted to include the area on our trip.  In particular, there is a road called the Cascade Lakes Scenic Byway which I had heard about at Black Butte and have wanted to drive ever since.

This was our opportunity.  We took I5 south from Portland and turned off near Salem onto US 20 which follows the South Santiam River up into the Cascades, across the Santiam Pass, and down into the town of Sisters.  Although there was plenty of beautiful scenery along this route, we didn't stop because we hadn't left Portland until mid-afternoon, and we wanted to get to our campground at the Bend Sisters RV Resort before dark.

We arrived shortly after 6:00 PM  to find an almost totally empty park.  Although this was a new and highly unusual experience for us, it wasn't completely unexpected.  That's because a major forest fire,  the Pole Creek Fire, had been burning near Sisters for the past two weeks.  We first got wind of this (sorry, bad pun) as we had headed north from Portland.  At that time, there was a preliminary evacuation order in effect for Sisters, and very poor air quality due to smoke.  Fortunately, however, the fire was 80% contained by the time we left Portland heading south, and indeed when we reached the campground we couldn't even smell any smoke.  There were only a handful of RVs in the park that holds about fifty that night.  And I must say, although the scenery didn't compare with The Living Forest or Sol Duc Hot Springs, the facilities were the best we've seen.  Every site was flat level, had a paved pull-through driveway, a groomed lawn, and a fire ring in the midde of a small paver-stone patio.  And of course full hookups.  The bathrooms featured curtains, travertine floors, and easy chairs.

The park is located immediately adjacent to the Sisters Rodeo grounds, and we immediately noticed that the rodeo grounds were full of tents, porta-potties,  portable showers and mess kitchens, and other paraphernalia associated with large-group camping.  At first we guessed it was Cycle Oregon, a week-long bike tour that takes place every fall.  But we quickly discovered that it was the main Pole Creek firefighters camp.  Ever wondered where hundreds of out-of-state firefighters sleep and eat for weeks on end while they go out to do battle on the fire lines every day, and sometimes all night as well?  Well, now you know.

The next morning we hit the road bright and early for our big day in the Oregon Cascades.  The first 10 miles or so of the byway consists of the road to the Mt. Bachelor ski area:

After the turn-off to the ski area, the road circles around Mt. Bachelor and passes close to the South Sister.  There are three peaks close to each other west of Bend which are called the (south, middle, and north) Sisters.  They are volcanic in orgin, as are all the major peaks of the Cascade Range.  Not too far past Mt. Bachelor, we turned off, more or less at random, at Sparks Lake and had lunch in the Enterprise:

There was a beautiful creek running through the meadow:

After lunch, we followed an awful dirt road with lots of washboard and potholes for a few miles, because I had a hunch that Sparks Lake would be worth seeing.  I was right, as you can see from the first photo in this post.  This was the "money shot" for the trip.  And it really did look like the picture.  Although we passed nearly a dozen more lakes on the byway, none were anywhere near as spectacular.

As sunset approached, we arrived at Crater Lake National Park, our last scenic stop of the trip.  We had incredibly lucky weather on this trip -- not a drop of rain -- and the sunshine held nicely during our stay at Crater Lake.  Spending three and a half weeks in the Pacific Northwest without a drop of rain is a serious accomplishment.  The fact that we bought expensive rain gear before we left was probably responsible.  It's an elaboration on the old idea that if you bring your umbrella it won't rain.  But having sunshine at Crater Lake is critical because it's the only way you can see the amazingly deep blue:

And I was even more fortunate on this shot to have a total absence of wind on the lake, which accounts for the mirror-like surface.  Wizard Island, which you see sitting near the west shore of the lake, is the top of a volcano which collapsed into its empty magma chamber after a gigantic eruption 7700 years ago, forming the crater which filled up with snow melt over the next several hundred years.   Before the eruption the mountain was 12,000 ft. high.  Now the rim elevation varies between 7000 and 8000 ft.  This is actually quite a lot of elevation if you're hiking uphill -- there's significantly less oxygen than you get at sea level.  It's also high enough to get a lot of winter snow -- they average 44 feet of snow per year.

Driving around the rim of the crater, one finds many interesting photo ops.  I'll leave you with my favorite:

The Third Best City in the World

The Economist Liveability Ranking of world cities for August 2012 ranks Vancouver third in the world out of a total of 140.  It was edged out by Melbourne, Australia and Vienna, Austria.  (No. 140 was Dhaka, Bangladesh.)  There were no US cities in the top ten.  We only spent one and a half days there, but that was enough time to understand the ranking.  It's beautiful, clean, and has good public transportation.  There are several other liveability rankings based on various criteria, but notably none of them rank any US city in the top ten. So instead of continually repeating the mantra that "we're the greatest country in the world", it might be worthwhile to actually look at the rest of the world and see what we might learn.

We crossed the Strait of Georgia from Nanaimo aboard the MV Queen of Oak Bay, operated by BC Ferries.  This ferry was a big step up from the Coho which brought us to Victoria.  Bigger, much better cafe, nice gift shop, and free internet.  It was sad to have to leave the Living Forest Campground (previous post) but we once again found ourselves pressed for time.  On future camping trips, we have resolved to allow at least twice as much time as we think we might possibly need.

Our first stop on the British Columbia mainland was Grouse Mountain, because it's on the way in to the city from the ferry terminal in Horseshoe Bay.

 I visited Grouse Mountain one night back in the 70's on our way to Whistler and remembered very clearly the highly unusual experience of seeing the lights of Vancouver as we skied.  You can get to the base of the tram on a city bus.  Back in the 70's, there was just a restaurant at the top.  But when we got off the tram on this trip, we found a few more attractions,  such as this:

and this:

There are two grizzly bears living on top of Grouse Mountain, in a 5-acre enclosure surrounded by an electric fence.  They were both brought there as orphaned cubs.  Grizzly cubs usually stay with their mother for several years, and have almost no chance of surviving on their own.  So it was decided to try an experiment where instead of being destroyed (the usual procedure)  the cubs would be placed in the enclosure and food would secretly be scattered in various places.  That way, it was thought, they would learn to forage for food and not to depend on humans.  Then when they grew up they could be released back into the wild with no danger that they would seek out humans for food.  But it was eventually decided that releasing them would be too dangerous because of all the contact they had had with humans, and so they remain.

The next day, being short of time, we decided to take the GrayLine tour, and saw some highpoints of the city:

At the beginning of this trip, we thought we would have time to explore more of British Columbia, but this was not to be.  We headed south out of Vancouver,  back across the border at Blaine WA, stopping for lunch with a high school friend of Cherie's in Seattle, and then pushing on to Portland and a second visit to the Jantzen Beach RV park.

The Daily Colonist

Many newspapers have completely predictable and hackneyed names: Post, Times, Journal, and of course that most original of all: News.  The most striking thing that I remember about my previous visit as a child to Victoria, BC was how impressed I was with the name of their newspaper:  "The Daily Colonist".  Not only is it almost certainly unique, it also says much of what you need to know about the cultural heritage of British Columbia, or at least it did back in the nineteen fifties when I was last there.  They are, or were, more British than the British.  This may have been due in part to the fact that British Columbia was originally a separate British colony independent from the rest of Canada.

Sadly, the name has by now been bowdlerized to "The Times Colonist".  And over the past several days I got the distinct impression that BC is now more PC, as it were.  Victoria doesn't seem anywhere near as quaint as it did, although Afternoon Tea at the Empress Hotel still seemed very traditional.  We had sandwiches, scones with jam, and of course endless refills of excellent tea by an overly attentive waiter.

We've been to Canada at least four times that I can remember in recent years:  cycling in Nova Scotia, skiing in Quebec, attending a conference in Banff, and now in the Enterprise.  I've invariably found the Canadians to be friendly, helpful, and welcoming.  But more than that, I feel a noticeable difference between the Canadian Way of Life and the American Way of Life.  In Canada it's more of "we're all in this together" as opposed to the American "it's every man for himself".  Possibly just my imagination, but I don't think so.  As just one example, the Canadians actually have a decent universal health care system.

We arrived in Victoria from Port Angeles aboard the MV Coho and were greeted as we left the pier by a friendly but inquisitive Canadian immigration official.  She was most interested in how many guns we had and where we kept them.  After being assured that we had no guns, mace, or tasers, she went on to fruits and vegetables, and sadly proceeded to relieve us of the last of our excellent Oregon apples.  We drove around the harbor past the Parliament building, pictured above at sunset, to the Empress where we took another camping break for the two days in Victoria.

Our first full day took us to the spectacular Butchart Gardens:

If you are ever lucky enough to visit Victoria, the gardens are an absolute must-see.  Mr. Butchart amassed a fortune in the cement business which involved quarrying limestone, among other things.  The photo above is from the portion of the gardens called "the sunken garden" which was the abandoned limestone quarry, until Mrs. Butchart had the idea that it needed to be spruced up a bit.  An interesting sidelight:  the gardens are still owned by the descendants of the Butcharts. Every privately owned tourist attraction I've ever seen, except for this one, has been somewhat garish and tasteless.  Perhaps we have here another example of contrast between the two countries?  Or maybe I just haven't yet come across any of the elegant privately owned tourist attractions in the U.S.

The next morning we visited the BC Museum before driving up the island to Nanaimo. They had a somewhat ordinary display of dinosaurs on the second floor, but on the third floor, devoted to the human history of British Columbia, we found an impressive display featuring, among other things, replicas of Captain Vancouver's ship, a coal mine, an early fish canning plant, and an entire street full of shops circa 1900 that you could actually go into.  Oh yes, and a well-preserved Model T ford that our guide assured us was still operational.

Arriving in Nanaimo, we checked in to the "Living Forest Oceanside RV resort", and from our campsite, this is what we saw:

Oh, yes.  Swimming right below us were two seals and there was a kingfisher perched on a piling.  I can safely say that the "Living Forest" is by far the most impressive RV park we've seen to date.  After setting up camp, we took a walk along one of the walking trails in the park, and found this:

and this:

What more can I say?

The Linger Longer Lodge

When I was 11 years old, my Dad and Stepmother spent the summer in Seattle and I stayed with them for six weeks.  I arrived shortly after my sister Ann was born, so they decided that it would be a good idea for Dad and I to take a week together and do a road trip.  This was the only time the two of us ever spent any time alone together.  The ostensible purpose was so that I wouldn't feel so jealous of my new sister, but in retrospect I think Dad was happy to have an excuse to get away and get a good night's sleep for a week.  In any event, we wound up on the Olympic Peninsula, and driving through the town of Quilcene we discovered the Linger Longer Lodge.  Although we only intended to spend the night before continuing on into Olympic National Park, the lodge turned out to be true to its name and we lingered there for the entire week.  We used it as a base from which to visit various attractions in the park.  So on this trip,  I thought it would be interesting to go back down memory lane and revisit the LLL.   More on this later.

After visiting with most of my Portland relatives (sister Ellen, cousins Neil and Steve) for a few days, Cherie and I got a late start out of the Jantzen Beach RV resort and headed north to Olympic National Park, our next destination.  When I was a kid, Jantzen Beach was THE big amusement park in Portland, so as we approached I was expecting to see the ferris wheel, roller coasters, and so forth.  Alas, all we found were Target, Bed Breakfast and Beyond, and the usual coterie of box stores.  It seems that shopping centers make more money than amusement parks.  As usual, economics trumps all.

But on with the narrative.  Due to our late start, we drove into the park,  passed beautiful Lake Crescent pictured above without stopping, and barely made it to Sol Duc Hot Springs to set up camp before nightfall.  But as it happened, we got a relatively secluded spot next to the river.  The next day we hiked up to the falls:

and then "took the waters" when we returned.  Sol Duc Lodge was built in 1912 at the height of the "hot springs fad" for lack of a better word, at a cost of over a half million dollars.  That sum corresponds to nearly $50 million in today's dollars.   It was huge, with 165 guest rooms, a three-story sanitorium with 100 beds, laboratory facilities, and various other outbuildings.  A sawmill was built at the site to supply lumber for all this construction.  The guests were driven 9 miles to the lodge from Lake Crescent aboard a fleet of Stanley Steamers, which if you've never hear of them, were famous steam-powered automobiles of the day.   The prevailing view at that time was that soaking in, and yes, drinking the hot sulfurous water would cure whatever ailed you.  Today there are big signs warning the guests NOT to drink the water.  But it's still OK to soak, and soak we did.

This is the perfect spot for a brief commercial break on the folly of health fads.  The problem here is not that people think health fads work, but rather that one person's fad is another persons's magical cure.  How to separate the fads from the magical cures?   The answer is simple:  there are no magical cures, people! The human body is a very complex organism which has evolved over millions of years to its present state, and is only recently beginning to be understood in any detail.  Yes, many conditions can now be cured.   Not by magic,  but by a long, difficult, painstaking process of discovery called science.  End of commercial.

In 1916, only four years after it opened, the Sol Duc Lodge burned to the ground.  Due to a defective chimney flue, the wooden roof caught fire.   As the story goes, the fire short-circuited the electric organ, which then proceeded to play Beethoven's Funeral March until silenced by the flames.  Today there's only a small gift shop and restaurant on the site, together with some housekeeping cabins and a campground.

The second day we drove back to Lake Crescent Lodge.  I had incorrectly remembered that the Linger Longer was located on Lake Crescent, and I thought that maybe only the name had changed.  Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case.   Stifling our disappointment, we hiked up to yet another falls:

The theme of lodge plus hiking trail to falls seems to be a recurrent one in Olympic National Park.  But in reality, the park is huge -- around 1,460 sq. mi. -- and consists mostly of wilderness accesible only by backpacking trails.  We barely scratched the surface on this trip.  It would have taken the better part of a week just to see what is accesible by road.

But what of the Linger Longer Lodge?  After we got back on the grid, I did some internet research.  It hadn't been on Lake Crescent after all, but in the town of Quilcene on Puget Sound.  And sadly, it had followed in the footsteps of the Sol Duc Lodge, burning to the ground on Halloween night in 1959.   Apparently the firefighters showed up in their Halloween costumes.  One can only imagine quite a sight.

The Oregon Coast

After white-knuckling the Enterprise out of Petrolia, we spent two nights in Eureka and had dinner with Mara and Chris before heading up the coast of Oregon.  Mara is a friend of Cherie's from middle school.  Memorable moment:  We were talking about our visit to Petrolia and I asked Chris if he'd ever been there.  He replied that he'd ridden his bike over the route we had just driven many times!  That was amazing enough, but then he added that there is a 95-mile bike race every year around the loop from Ferndale to Weott to Petrolia and back to Ferndale in which he had competed often.  Wow.  There's no way I could ever cycle that course in under 24 hours, because I'd be walking quite a ways.

Anyway, we took three days driving the nearly 400 miles of the Oregon Coast.  The scenery was spectacular, as advertised.  In this blog thus far, I haven't been posting lots of photos, but given that a picture is worth a thousand words, I think I will save some space by changing style here and letting you see something of what we saw.

The first night we camped at Sunset Bay State Park, just south of Coos Bay:

I have to say that the State of Oregon does a great job with their parks.  The RV campground at Sunset Bay had full hookups, which is unusual in state parks and unheard of in national parks.  For the uninitiated, "full hookups" in RVspeak means that you can connect to water, electricity, and sewer.  The alternative is called "dry camping" which means that your water comes from your own fresh water tank and your power comes from either your batteries or your generator.  The Enterprise has pretty small tanks, so we can only dry camp for a day or two without dumping our waste water and refilling our fresh water.  

Sunset Bay had some pretty interesting geology:

I think what has happened here is that the Pacific Plate has pushed underneath the North American Plate.  But that's just a guess.  I will have to defer to the geologists.

Immediately adjacent to Sunset Bay, we visited Shore Acres State Park, which features a beautiful flower garden:

with some spectacular dahlias:

The next day we drove up the coast to Salishan, a rather elegant golf resort.  We took a break from the Enterprise, had a good dinner at the restaurant, and spent the night.  On our third and final day, we happened to notice a turnoff for the "Three Capes Scenic Byway" which we fortunately decided to take.  The most spectacular of the three was Cape Mears:

which sported an interesting decommissioned lighthouse:

The light ran on kerosene until the 1930's.  There were 5 wicks which put out enough light to be seen 18 miles offshore! This was possible because of a clever Fresnel lens which focused the beam:

I'll spare you the interesting optical details, which I only partly understood myself.   Suffice it to say that these lighthouses were miracles of engineering in their day.

Our last campground on the coast was at Fort Stevens State Park at the mouth of the Columbia river:

As you can see, the Columbia gets pretty wide by the time it reaches the Pacific.  The campground is truly huge -- over 500 campsites.  And once again we had water and electric connections.

Fort Stevens was built during the Civil War, for some reason.  Perhaps they feared that the Confederates might send a fleet around Cape Horn and invade the Pacific Northwest.  Who knows.  There's really no telling what strange things people are motivated to do when they feel threatened.  Just consider, for example, all of the wacky things we have done since 9/11,  such as invading Iraq.  This disaster will almost certainly go into the books as the worst foreign policy blunder in the history of the United States.  So I suppose it's only fitting that it was committed by the worst president in the history of the United States.  Iraq alone would definitely earn him the title, but to cement his standing,  after inheriting a $230 billion surplus from President Clinton he managed to leave office with an astronomical deficit and the economy in total shambles.  Way to go, W!

The Lost Coast

Well, we're finally back on the road, heading north towards British Columbia.  In the photo above, Cherie is standing at Cape Mendocino, the westernmost point of land in the continental 48 states.  It is located along the "lost coast", which is a stretch of the Northern California coast that extends south from the Humboldt Bay for roughly 80 miles to Shelter Cove.  I haven't checked carefully, but I'm pretty sure the lost coast is THE most inaccessible stretch of coastline in the lower 48. The southern section can only be reached by sea or on foot.  The remainder is accessed via the Mattole road, one of the steepest and most sinous country roads it has ever been my lot to drive, especially in a 25-foot camper.  So on this segment of our current road trip, the RoadTrek finally got a real honest-to-goodness trek.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We left the Bay Area last week and drove north on 101 to the town of Willits, where we took another country road about 15 miles east to a place called Emandal, which is a farm on the Eel river.  The family that owns it runs a small retreat/camp where you can stay in rustic cabins, swin au naturel in the river, and be fed organic delights in a communal dining room.  Emandal is the site of the "Wild Women's Weekend", an event that Cherie has been attending for the past several years.  Most of the attendees, including Cherie, are present or former obstetrical nurses and midwives at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.

I dropped her off and beat a hasty retreat back to Willits and then drove over the coast range through a nice stand of second-growth redwood to the coastal town of Fort Bragg.  I camped at the Pomo RV park there for two nights in peace and quiet while the Wild Women were cavorting.  If you ever happen to be looking for a nice RV park in Fort Bragg, look no further than Pomo.

Fort Bragg is the northernmost significant town on Highway 1.  From there the road follows the coast north for another 50 miles or so before turning inland.  If you want to explore the coast northward from that point, you do so on foot.  I had a late but excellent seafood lunch by the water before repairing to Pomo for the evening.  The next day I explored Fort Bragg.  There's a quaint little railroad that runs across the coast range to Willits called the "Skunk Train".  It was originally built to service the logging camps up in the hills and it has been in continuous operation since 1885.  However, in recent years it has been mostly a tourist attraction.  If you're lucky like I was, you get the steam locomotive, No. 45, pulling your antiquated passenger car uphill along the Noyo river to a point they call "Northspur" about halfway between Fort Bragg and Willits.  In addition to a great view of the beautiful redwood forest,  we were treated to a rousing rendition of "The Wabash Cannonball", "She'll be Coming Around the Mountain" and other railroad-themed classics by our conductor, who turned out to be quite an accomplished performer on the guitar and harmonica.  At Northspur we all got out to have some lunch and wander about in the redwoods for a bit before reboarding the Skunk for the return trip.

After a leisurely breakfast in the Enterprise on Sunday, I bid farewell to Fort Bragg and wound my way back over the mountains to the Willits Safeway where I rejoined Cherie.  She had gotten a ride into town with a fellow Wild Woman, which was fortunate because although the road to Emandal was nowhere near as steep and winding as that which we were shortly to encounter, the last ten miles were unpaved washboard.  Not recommended for RV travel.  At any rate, after reprovisioning the Enterprise at the Safeway, we headed north into the redwoods.

We turned off 101 north of Garberville onto the "Avenue of the Giants" which took us into Humboldt Redwoods State Park.  The coast redwoods are sometimes confused with their southern cousins, the sequoias (see previous post), but there are significant differences.  The sequoias grow above 6,000 feet and thrive on the harsh winters, while the redwoods like the fog and mild temperatures near the ocean.  The redwoods are taller and skinnier than the sequoias.  But in terms of overall volume, the sequoias win hands down.  We turned off onto the Mattole road at Weott and drove through the impressive Rockefeller Grove before emerging from the Park and beginning our ascent through the King Range.

Halfway down the lost coast, there is a beautiful little valley where the Mattole river runs to the sea.  Near the mouth of the Mattole is the "town" of Petrolia where our friends John and Kathy have recently retired.  Petrolia consists of some farms, ranches, and houses scattered along the Mattole, together with a school, fire station, and post office/general store.  The adjective "remote" would be an understatement, because the Mattole valley is completely ringed by the steep mountains of the King Range.  There are three roads in, from Garberville to the south, Weott to the east, and Ferndale to the north.  They are all long, narrow, steep, and winding with lots of switchbacks and potholes.  We averaged about 15 MPH coming in from Weott and going out to Ferndale.

John and Kathy have been coming to Petrolia since the 70's, when they and a small group of friends bought some acreage up in the hills above the valley and built a small cabin.  More recently they bought nine acres in the valley and built a nice house which has all the modern conveniences:  electricity,  hot and cold running water, and flush toilets.  We visited and explored the valley with them for a few days before heading north to Eureka.  Both Cherie and I were impressed with the natural beauty of the area, but even more impressed that people would want to live that far from civilization.  It got us thinking about how differently people value things.  Different strokes for different folks.