Part 10: Ocean, Sky, Freedom: West Coast Bicycle Adventure—Canada to Mexico—Majestic Redwoods of Antiquity

By Frosty Wooldridge

Part 10: Enormous redwoods, camping among 2,500 year old trees

“Redwoods stand for centuries in defiance of ‘Father Time’.  They live for 2,500 years and longer. Riding beneath their cathedral majesty, you feel like your bicycle gallops through ‘time warriors’ who stood while the Romans conquered the known world.  Those silent giants pierce the sky along the California coast like no other ‘beings’ on Earth.  At 350 feet tall, they stand like sentinels to the ages.  To sit at the base of one of them means you ‘feel’ the historical energy of a tree that lived through 25 centuries of humanity’s fun and follies on this wondrous planet spinning through the ink-black of the universe.”  FHW, West Coast Ride

(Frosty, Sandi and Daniel at the base of a redwood in the Prairie Creek Redwood Grove, California, West Coast Ride.)

We headed south along Route 101 until we reached a turn-off for the “Prairie Creek Redwood Grove”.

“This will be the treat of our entire West Coast ride,” I said to Sandi and Daniel.

“Let’s make it happen,” said Sandi.

“I’m just along for the ride,” said Daniel.  “I’ve heard they are some pretty big trees.”

Since I traveled the coast as a 10-year-old kid with my parents, I saw them in my youth, teens, twenties, middle age and now into my golden years.  With each visit, those gigantic trees stun me with their height, girth, weight and age.  To ride through them boggles my mind. To stand at the base of one of them captures my entire spiritual being.  They put me into a mystical trance of joy, appreciation and wonder.

We pedaled for another 20 minutes along rolling terrain until the road slipped quietly into the redwood grove.  Each stand commands a name for whomever saved it from the lumberman’s ax.  Back in 1927, a group of Americans realized that 98 percent of the trees had been cut for fencing, homes, decks and shingles.  Nobody at the time realized that redwoods took 2,500 years to grow.  With only 2 percent left of the original trees, they formed the www.SaveTheRedwoodsLeague.org .  From that point to this day, private citizens donated money to buy all the remaining groves of redwoods. I became a member for 30 years. 

(Sandi and Daniel standing inside a living, burned out redwood, California, West Coast Ride.)

For the next two hours, we cycled through jaw dropping beauty in relative darkness of the forest floor.  We stood beside redwoods, inside burned out redwoods and walked on top of dead redwoods.  We discovered that when a redwood dies, it takes 20 to 30 years for it to fall over. It takes another 100 years for it to decay into the forest floor.  Redwoods expire 500 gallons of water daily.  They sport a base 25 feet in diameter. 

Many of them grow in groups of four or five.  To walk among them feels like striding through a magical kingdom.  Ferns grow everywhere on the woodland floor.  Lots of moss grows on dead trees. Lichens in all colors decorate the forest grounds. Limbs and bark cover the forest floor.  Flowers of every kind peek out of the foliage.  Birds chirp from all corners of the redwood forest.

We stopped at one tree to take a picture of all of us spread across the entire base with our bicycles.  Another burned out tree, but still living, took three of our bikes and ourselves inside it for a picture.  Another dead tree, over 300 feet long, endured our trampling up and down its entire length.  The root systems measured 35 feet in diameter.

“This is beyond anything I’ve ever done,” said Sandi.  “I can’t describe this kind of beauty.”

“This must be the most beautiful forest I have ever seen,” said Daniel.

“No question that this is ‘jaw dropping awesome’ beyond words,” I said.

After our magical mystery tour through the Prairie Creek Redwood Grove, we stopped at the ranger station for lunch. 

From a magical morning, we reached Trinidad, California where a fellow cyclist told us about the Hammond Trail hugging the coast. We took the route.

We weren’t quite prepared for the extraordinary numbers of volcanic islands that hugged the shoreline.  They created fantastic contrasts to the placid ocean.

(Daniel and Sandi riding along the redwoods in the Prairie Creek Grove, West Coast Ride. Notice the beauty from top to bottom, the serenity, the grace of nature.)

We reached Arcata after blowing our minds with all the visuals.

We stopped into another WarmShowers couple, Dick and Kathie, who treated us to fresh honey, hot showers, warm dinner and fabulous hospitality.  They invited us to stay over and share a potluck at the Grange House where a historian presented a fabulous slide show of the development of Humboldt County of Northern California. 

Dick proved a Renaissance man and Kathie a Renaissance woman. They built their own home from scratch.  Both bicycled around the world.  He taught physics and she created crafts.  He played horns.  She painted. They both raised bees and sold honey.  She created wise sayings on wood plaques.

We enjoyed no end to the marvelous kindness of strangers along our route.  As we pulled out of Dick and Kathie’s house, they took a shot of us to place in their two notebooks-full of touring cyclists from around the world.

(Daniel and Sandi riding along the coast with the fog bank covering the Pacific Ocean. When it broke in places, the blue waters sparkled in the sunshine. Sheer magic while bicycle touring.)

We pedaled across long bridges that hovered over dry riverbeds.  California stood in the middle of an extreme drought.  As we rolled north, golden, dead grass dominated every mile of our ride.  During our summer pedaling down the West Coast, we passed dozens of wildfires in Washington, Oregon and now into California. 

California’s 38 million people and headed toward 58 million within 30 years—need ever increasing amounts of water.  As a man who has witnessed overpopulation around the world in places like China, India and other regions of the planet, I find our own country in serious denial of our predicament.  Future generations face dramatic challenges on multiple fronts.  I hope we start a national discussion on America’s overpopulation predicament.

##