Recently in Redwood Empire Category

Reading the Redwoods

By Susan on March 3, 2009 9:19 PM | 2 Comments

As part of a nonfiction project, I've scoured the used booksellers of the internet and collected about 10 books about the history, ecology, and culture of the coastal redwood regions of California. As someone who split her childhood between the two great coastal redwood regions of the state - the Santa Cruz Mountains and the North Coast - I find it interesting how small the populations are that actually live there. It's a good thing, of course. Too many people spoil the trees, I think. But going through these books, many of the names are familiar to my mother or I, and every single photograph is a place I've been.

The reading list is enticing, and if I didn't already have a lot of reading for a class, I'd be completely submerged in redwoods by now. First up: "Coast Redwood: A Natural and Cultural History," a beautiful full color book with a more scientific bent about the great trees. Then the Save-the-Redwoods-League's "The Redwood Forest" edited by Reed F. Noss. My great-uncle was chairman of that organization for a number of years, and that volume will likely include more details of the long, hard fight to save places that most Americans would be shocked were ever threatened. Then on to the more recent "The Wild Trees" by Richard Preston, a best seller celebrated in the New Yorker which follows the work of a tree biologist in the canopy of the tallest trees of the North Coast. I got a steal on "Giants in the Earth" edited by Peter Johnstone, a compendium of all the literature ever written on the redwoods - fiction, nonfiction, Muir to Keruoac. $7.50 for a fresh copy discarded by the Antelope Library in California. And then "Conifers of California", by Ronald M. Lanner, another full-color delight with Audubon-style illustrations of all of California's amazing collection of trees.

And so I now have a nice collection of works on the redwood coasts. But all these books pre-date the final settlement of the north coast timber wars last year, and with things looking decidedly more optimistic for redwood conservation now than they have in decades, the tone of some of these books might be jarring. There was a long, long time when it seemed like most of nature would have to be lost. It was inconceivable when I was a child that the people who founded the Gap would come in and buy out Charles Hurwitz, ending his destruction of both forests and communities. But there it is.

Finding a subject about which you desperately want to write, and making yourself an expert on it, seems like as good a path forward as any for a writer. I'm not sure about "write what you know", but "write what you are familiar with, but about which you feel you don't know enough" seems more the thing. More updates as I find my way through these books over the next few months.

Below: Redwoods on clifftops overlook Gold Bluffs Beach, Humboldt County, California. Roosevelt Elk graze at center.

California Redwoods Travel Guide: Your Itinerary

By Susan on December 4, 2008 7:20 PM | 2 Comments

We're going on a trip, you and I, through the coastal regions of California which feature the world's tallest trees, the Coastal Redwoods. Cousins of the squatter Sequoias inland (eg Yosemite), the Coastal Redwoods are their own species, and live in a much different climate. The Coastal Redwoods come with their own people, too, and we'll spend plenty of times exploring small artsy towns. Here's your itinerary. As each of these destinations gets it's own page here at Northern Word, they'll all be linked here and contain links and references to help you plan your trip. All points in this itinerary are in the State of California. For best results, take this trip in July, August or early September. Take as many or as few of these stops as you like - and in the extended entries for each stop, plenty of alternatives will be offered.

This is part of an ongoing series at Northern Word that will assemble a travel guide to my homeland, if you will, the Redwood Empire of Northern California and my "hometown" of Humboldt County. You'll get travel specifics, links and tips, as well as some personal stories from my days in Humboldt.

Day 1: Fly into Eureka-Arcata Airport, now new and improved with an elk-proof fence! Flying into this remote airstrip located on a threatening sea cliff will take you most of a day from anywhere except the San Francisco Bay Area, so no time for sightseeing. After you arrive in your turboprop (hopefully on a clear day so you can see the endless green mountains below) pick up your pre-arranged rental car and toodle down to Arcata to stay the night in the Arcata Inn. Your hotel is located right on a Victorian shopping plaza full of fun shops and colorful characters, and the epicenter of the northcoast's environmental movement.

Day 2: Arcata & Trinidad: Keeping Arcata (best hippie town EVER) as your base, get your first taste of the big trees in one of the nation's most glorious city parks, Redwood Park in Arcata. Afterwords, stop by the small but fascinating Natural History Museum, sponsored by Humboldt State University. Spend some time shopping Arcata's quaint Victorian shops. Drive a few minutes north to Trinidad, and take a long walk on a gorgeous beach. Have lunch at a nearby seafood stop or the Indian casino (both with ocean view). Feeling energetic? I'll have some extra options for you. Return to Arcata and see if anything interesting is going on at Humboldt State that evening, or catch a movie at the fully restored Arcata Minor theater, a hundred years old with a stunning interior and a balcony. Only one block from your Inn.

Day 3: Lady Bird Johnson Grove: Check out of the Inn. Rent a tent and gear at the outdoor store on the Arcata Plaza. Head north to Orick, about 45 minutes from Arcata on the Redwood Highway. Stop at the beautiful Redwood National Park Visitor's Center on the beach. Get maps & permits for the days ahead. Zip a couple of minutes north and head up Bald Hills Road to the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. Spend about two hours here, hiking around one of the most spectacular groves of old-growth redwoods in existence. Then head over to your (already reserved) overnight location, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, and drive several miles on a dirt road to Gold Bluffs Beach where you will camp on a remote strip of sand next to high sandstone cliffs.

Day 4: Fern Canyon and Prairie Creek Redwoods: Wake up and discover you're camping right next to an amazing canyon covered in ferns. The location is so unique it was featured in Jurassic Park 2 as if it was part of a tropical island. Explore the canyon and the beautiful beach and bluffs (no swimming here), catch sight of the world's largest living Elk, the Roosevelt, who often wander right through the campground. Then pack the tent and head back up to the main park headquarters, where you'll check into the campground there. Spend the rest of the day exploring the giant trees and viewing the elk herds of this jewel of a state park. Watch out for cougars.

Day 5: Redwood National Park Tall Trees Grove: Leave your tent at Prairie Creek (and any food in the bear locker) and head back up Bald Hills Road, well past Lady Bird Johnson. With permit in hand (you got it at the visitor's center a couple of days ago) hike the Tall Trees Trail, an all-day effort that can be strenuous. The trail takes you down to a grove with several of the world's tallest trees. In the summer, you can cross the pleasantly named monster Redwood Creek to get a better view. Bring plenty of water, good shoes, and enjoy this ten mile hike. Return, exhausted, to Prairie Creek for the night.

Day 6-7. Jedediah Smith State Park & Del Norte County: Head north on a stunning drive from Prairie Creek. Stop for plenty of photo ops along the way. Don't miss "Trees of Mystery" which has an excellent Native American museum and - believe it or not - a sky tram that takes you through the canopy of an old growth redwood grove. Very much worth a stop. Head north to Crescent City, which was wiped out by a tsunamai after the '69 Alaska quake and is now a small supply point for a very small population here. Gas up and replenish camping supplies at the local stores. Check out a short walk to the sculpted beauty of Enderts Beach. Sometime after lunch, head inland on Highway 199 to Jedediah Smith State Park, where you'll camp right by the Smith River, a National Wild and Scenic River. You'll be sleeping across the river from a grove of redwoods thought to be the greatest concentration of biomass on the planet earth. They don't get much bigger than this. The next morning hike through the park and see the sights.

Day 8: Drive to Eureka. Drive back down Hwy 101 and pick up sights you missed on the way: When you find a bridge with Golden Bears, take a sharp right onto a small highway and find a fake farmhouse with a stunning view that used to be a submarine watching station in WW2. See the Klamath River overlook as well. Good whale watching area at the right time of year. On your way south, stop in Arcata and turn in the tent and gear your rented at the Outdoor Store on the Arcata Plaza. Drive a few miles further south to Eureka, and check into the Best Western Eureka Inn, a modern motel with a Victorian motif. Spend the remainder of the day checking out Eureka's exquisite victorian district, called "Old town" Don't miss the famous Carson Mansion and the many art galleries, which feature the work of America's premier landscape painting artist community. For a good overview of local work, see the Morris Graves museum nearby.

Day 9: Drive to Scotia. The Scotia Inn is your stop for the night, in a timber town that up until recently was owned by the Most Evil Company on Earth. But not anymore. With the effective end of the redwood wars with the purchase of Pacific Lumber by the family that founded the Gap Clothing Stores, it's safe for an environmentally conscious person to sleep in Scotia again. Timber harvesting goes on, but in a sustainable manner. And it's a nice inn very close to some great parks to see.

Day 10-11: Humboldt Redwoods State Park & vicinity: Explore the redwood park most likely to make you feel like a Hobbit. Humboldt Redwoods has the biggest fallen trees you will EVER see - the log to end all logs is right here. Truly, a visitor feels like a lilliputian in this forest.

Day 12: Travel home. Check out of the Scotia Inn early and head back to the airport. Engage in meditation exercises to prepare you for the moment your rickety turboprop drops off the edge of the sea cliff and sends you on your way home, with or without the contents of your stomach.

Alternate itinerary - follow these stops if you want to drive to the Redwood Empire from the San Francisco Bay Area. A popular option for out of staters who can fly in to this area more cheaply than points north.

Day 1: Santa Cruz - Beach town, counterculture fun, butterflies, funky shops, sweeping views, big waves, and a steam train.

Day 2: The Santa Cruz mountains - the ancient, low mountain range up the river from Santa Cruz. California's first state park - Big Basin - introduces you to the really big trees and some super-squiggly redwood bark. Boulder Creek, a formerly rough n' ready logging town, now all gussied up. Long drives on twisty roads in the dense redwoods. This is the darker, narrower, more compact version of redwood country.

Day 3: Head up to San Francisco via Highway 1. Enjoy the scenery, and end your day in a city whose thousands of Victorians are built out of old growth redwood. See the sights. We won't spend much time on this stop as guidebooks aplenty exist to help you. On to the north.

Day 6 - 7: After a day or so in San Francisco, start the drive into California's northern territories. Take a quick stop in Marin county to see the relatively modest Muir Woods - a precious grove, to be sure, but outdone by everything north (and Big Basin, too, for that matter). Then step over to the Marin Headlands and see an amazing lighthouse with a swinging bridge, because you can. Need more lighthouse? Head to the coast to see Point Reyes National Seashore. Why, you ask? There are no redwoods at the very end of the point, are there. Well, you go there because it's beautiful. And though it is most beautiful on a rare clear day, if the fog is low enough you'll see something amazing too. Stay tuned for important tips on seeing the lighthouse in this episode.

Day 8: Drive north into the Mendocino Coast. Stay at one of the B&B's along the way. Wander north to Ft. Bragg. See gorgeous views and a new patch of land just preserved for the public.

Day 9: On to the Redwood Empire - see main itinerary above.

The Northern Word California Redwoods Travel Guide: Intro

By Susan on November 27, 2008 2:45 PM | 1 Comment

Ever wanted to see the redwoods? Those impossibly tall trees you've heard about? The big trees everyone tried to save all those years - do you want to know if they did? Save them, that is? Well, you've come to the right place. Raised in the redwoods of Northern California - two different regions of the redwoods, in fact - I am often asked for advice on where to go, when to go, where to stay, what drives to take, what towns to visit, where the biggest trees are, and lots more. On at least two occasions I've mapped out full itineraries for people visiting the big trees, and gotten rather nice feedback on the results. So now that I've settled the Northern Word blog into what I hope will be its permanent home, I'm going to put together a series of travel articles - with pictures, where I have them - of some of America's least-traveled treasures. You'll see them interspersed with other posts here over the next few weeks, and a new category has been created on the right to gather them all. When done, this should be a comprehensive travel guide to the California redwoods. Suggestions and comments are always welcome.

Why see the redwoods? Because you haven't seen a real tree till you've seen one. And because the regions in which these trees thrive are some of the most culturally vibrant and interesting in the United States. And because finding them can take you on long drives through the gorgeous, unpopulated parts of California you didn't know existed. Like the fairy-tale green Carson mansion in Eureka, California, pictured below. If the witch from Wicked were to move to redwood country, this is where she'd live. Ironically, it's a private men's club. Made of solid 19th-century old-growth redwood.

The War of my Childhood Has Ended

By Susan on August 24, 2008 10:12 PM | 1 Comment

(Reposted from my diary at Daily Kos) Growing up in the redwoods of Northern California was one of the luckiest things in my life. My early childhood was nature-soaked, set within the steep, narrow redwood canyons of Santa Cruz County, California, along a tributary of the San Lorenzo River. Moss grew on the roof and the deck and me, too, if I stood still long enough.

At 14, we moved 350 miles up the coast to Humboldt County, California. The redwoods here were bigger, grander, towering on hills to receive the high fog off the north Pacific. The country was wilder. The bears were more numerous and cougars chased deer through my backyard. Empty beaches glowed with diatoms at midnight. The towns, Victorian postcards all, were more isolated. To my eyes it was a place of extraordinary natural beauty. I'd started school before I knew I had just moved into a war zone. The redwood wars preceded me and the redwood wars outlasted my time in Humboldt, but this month I can finally say that the biggest of them - the war with Pacific Lumber, once controlled by Charles Hurwitz, the junk bond king, the man who would have cut them all down at once if he could have - that war is over. And the trees, and the people of Humboldt, won.

The photograph at the top of this LA Times story is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It shows the president of the newly formed Humboldt Redwoods company meeting personally with treesitters, as they are in the midst of climbing down from their perches on former Pacific Lumber company land for what is hoped will be forever. You've can't imagine how completely impossible this would have been in 1993, when I was in high school, when the war was on.

And it was a war. People got physically hurt. Threats were common. Cars with environmental bumperstickers (one belonging to a friend) were vandalized, or left with nasty notes. Environmental splinter groups were tied - rightly or wrongly - to bombs. My mother, a board member of the Sierra Club at the time, remembered attending a meeting with Pacific Lumber and local citizens in which the possibility of violence hung about the room like smoke.

The community was utterly divided - you were a tree hater or a tree lover, a spotted owl killer or a spotted owl saver, a commie liberal or a flag-waving jingoistic fool. I was lucky to live in the town of Arcata, the hippie town, the base of the timber resistance. During those years living in Arcata was like living under a bizarre blockade; when you left the town, the "outside" was dingier, greyer, full of republicans, full of armchair lumbermen who, you assumed, hated your guts. You were a foreigner five miles south in Eureka, unwelcome five miles north in McKinleyville. The papers were full of letters to the editor announcing boycotts of "Red" Arcata and its socialist environmentally friendly sewer system.

Coming home, Arcata was a Victorian oasis, colorful shops and a plaza full of colorful people. It was like the Yellow Submarine, when they walk out of the sepia Liverpool and arrive in the land of people wearing fruit on their heads. And they did. And still do. I don't mean this to be an exposition on how the redwood wars ended, and how this was possible. I'm just in a strange place right now to think that THIS confict, this PALCO war, this thing that drove the sour feeling in the pit of my stomach when we had to go to McKinleyville or Fortuna on some errand, the part that made me afraid to wear my Arcata high sweatshirt outside of town, that made me beg my mother not to put a Sierra Club bumpersticker on our car, despite our family's long history with that organization - this part has ended. And I'm trying to get my head around it.

But some short explanation would help those who weren't there. Back in the 1980's, the company known as Pacific Lumber, which owns vast redwood reserves including most of the remaining unprotected old growth redwoods left on earth, was taken over by Maxxam corporation, under the direction of Charles Hurwitz. At that time the company left a relatively sustainable model and ramped up production dramatically, engaging in "vast clearcuts" in the words of the afore cited LA Times article. The company went from being a stable employer to being perennially unstable. Environmentalists rightly turned attention on PALCO and its practices and as tensions escalated over time, everyone in the community took sides.

The Headwaters Forest settlement, spearheaded in part by Dianne Feinstein, paid PALCO a king's ransom for one tract of old growth, and provided a fund for Humboldt County to use for retraining and economic development. But the big questions were still unsettled, and the sustainability of PALCO's practices for both the forests and the employees was left in doubt. The bankruptcy of PALCO could have been predicted by almost anybody who observed the company's reckless practices and the adventerous financial habits of its controlling interests. But with that bankruptcy came a new opportunity.

To make a long story short, for a period of time this year, the fate of the redwoods hung in the balance, with a single judge to make the decision that would change everything. His choices were:

Sell off PALCO in pieces, to investors who would clear cut or use the area for secluded monster homes with timber cutting rights, and lay off most of the remaining employees.

Sell to the family that founded The Gap clothing company, who now run Mendocino Redwood Company, and who promise to follow sustainable logging practices that will ensure long-term stability and conservation of several hundred jobs. The track record at Mendocino, though not perfect, was a model of sustainability compared to PALCO.

The fact that this was even a question tells you how far into the world of slash and burn corporate dominance this country has gone, but thankfully, the judge didn't take that route. Pacific Lumber is no more, and the newly named Humboldt Redwoods Company is slowly taking shape.

They won't always behave, of course, and there are other timber companies still, which are less responsible. But this was the big one. And Humboldt has the environmentalist infrastructure in place to keep them honest. Politics have changed radically in Humboldt over the years; the bright colors of Arcata seem to have leaked throughout the region, whose people have in recent years have run both Wal-Mart and a new gas pipeline out of town before they got started. The art community thrives even more outside of Arcata than in it. The DA is an unabashed liberal. Right wing pockets persist, but this last chapter in Pacific Lumber will take the wind out of their sails, with no PALCO to prop up right wing causes. Only a lone wingnut family, the Arkleys, are left to puff up the dead-tree, no job policies of the previous generation of wingers. Humboldt and Mendocino counties now represent bastions of rural liberalism, much like parts of Northern Minnesota.

Click through to the LA Times story and really look at that picture. The man is speaking to activists with respect, with admiration even, and with an eye toward the future. Read the quotes from respected activists. I can't believe it's happened, but there it is, and though I'm very far away, I feel like this is one of the big victories, one of the things that we should all remember when the news of the day makes us believe the world has gone in the toilet. Sometimes good things happen.

Remembering Humboldt

By Susan on August 17, 2007 11:25 PM | Click here to post a comment

My home town is Arcata, California, deep in the redwood Empire and the County of Humboldt, set along a marshy coastline, filled to the brim with brightly painted Victorians. In its middle is a grassy plaza with a statue of a dead president and herds of errant hippies. Up and down the coast are empty beaches that are sometimes foggy, and sometimes not, and when you are away from Humboldt, far away as I am now, you wonder if it is even real. At least I know Robbie the dog was there with me, though I wonder if his memory of the place has also started to fade like a beach in the fog.

Was the fog coming in or out? Am i forgetting Humboldt, or just beginning to remember it?

Beach near mouth of Elk River, Eureka, CA

Manila Dunes

By Susan on May 13, 2005 7:21 AM | 1 Comment

Today we have a guest photographer, my mom, Pat, who has a shiny new point-and-shoot camera and took it out to the beach recently. Humboldt County, California--roughly the size of Delaware for the East Coast readers--is a beautiful place, with the world's tallest trees, craggy mountains, and empty beaches. It's about 300 miles north of San Francisco. It is also where I went to high school. I'll be posting some of my own pics of Humboldt later on, but today let's join Holly the Corgi as she tours Manila Dunes, aka Samoa Dunes, a thin stretch of land that acts as a barrier between the Pacific Ocean and Humboldt Bay.

Continue reading Manila Dunes.

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Welcome to Northern Word, the online home of writer Susan McNerney. Northern Word features lots of photography, words on the business and process of writing, original bits of fiction and nonfiction, travelogues and travel writing, and anything else that Susan feels like posting. Browse the categories on the left (or the topic cloud below) to see previous episodes, and don't miss the two big travelogues: A Week in Rome and A Great Southwest Road Trip. Susan is originally from the redwood regions of Northern California, but now lives and writes in chilly Minnesota.

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