Ok, here are some pictures of the Giant Redwood forest and trails. There just isn’t any way to adequately represent this forest in pictures.
Today we started off by driving the Avenue of the Giants to find the Founders Grove trail. The trail is wide, flat, and only about 0.3 miles. It features the Founders Tree shown above. This area is a lot like Muir Woods but without the crowds and with even more giant trees. Maybe in the summer the crowds are bad but right now we only shared trails and parking with a few others. The forest is truly spectacular and there are trails all over this forest. This whole area is essentially the Homboldt State Park. Until recently the park claimed the tallest and largest living thing on Earth but now that title is assigned to the Redwoods National and State Park area. We are only talking like 10ft height difference either way. The only drag for us is that Red Dog isn’t allowed on any trails. We did let him explore the parking area at the Founders Grove and just after we found a pull out for river access that allowed dogs. The river access is the first time we officially used our Jeep 4WD capability, though probably not absolutely necessary. The access did warn that 4WD was recommended. 4WD was used for climbing a short embankment back up to the road on wet smooth rocks.
After our hike we drove to Eureka CA. We had lunch at the Lost Coast Brewery (Tripadvisor #1 at this time). The fish and chips were really good and the place had a nice vibe. We drove the small historical area including a few historic buildings and then we went to the Sequoya City Park in Eureka. The city park was terrific. Again, huge trees with nice trails everywhere. The best part was Red Dog was allowed on-leash. We spent quite a while walking all around the park and Maverick had a blast. I should mention that it was raining steady pretty much all day. The temperature was about 65 so we weren’t really cold, just wet. We just suited up in our raincoats and made the best of it. It wasn’t bad at all. It continued raining and much harder through the night (about 2 inches in 24 hours). We heard that San Francisco area got 4-5 inches so its probably good we got out of there when we did.
After the city park we replenished supplies at Walmart and headed back to the coach. As you can probably tell from all of the pictures, we had a great day and really enjoyed the forest.
The prohibition for Maverick was probably for his safety. They were afraid he’d pull a hamstring hiking a leg on trees that big… 8^)