You didn’t believe in Ents, and then you met the redwoods


Giant redwoods in Sequoia-Kings National Parks

US Department of Interior, May 30, 2013 – Sometimes you have to look up to appreciate the beauty of America’s great outdoors. @SequoiaKingsNPS

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 19th, 2013 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Forestry, National Parks, Nature, Travel, trees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to You didn’t believe in Ents, and then you met the redwoods

  1. Ed Darrell's avatar Ed Darrell says:
    June 20, 2013 at 12:50 pm

    I spent some time in Marin County after the 1976 elections, tending bar and washing dishes for for my aunt, at Red Robin Catering. On her insistence (didn’t require arm-twisting) I spent a couple of weekday afternoons in the Muir Woods. On weekdays, it was almost totally deserted, but always wonderful. There were a couple of people who were regulars in walking there, but generally the parking lot was a panorama of non-California license plates.

    The Adirondacks is our nation’s largest park area. I’ve spent more time there. I’ve been the length of the Blue Ridge, hiked some in the Carolinas, been all over Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming’s forests. Made a trip to Calgary and the Canadian Rockies. Been out into the forests of Washington and Oregon.

    Nothing compares with those giant trees in California. Even the giant old-growth Douglas firs farther north don’t have the same majesty and mystery (nor size!).

    I knew Teddy had a hand in preserving the Muir Woods, but didn’t know the story. Similar to his saving the Grand Canyon from logging and damming, and damning.

    O, Son of the Morningstar, how far have the GOP fallen from TR’s days!

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  2. Porlock Junior's avatar Porlock Junior says:
    June 20, 2013 at 2:23 am

    Me, I keep expecting to run into some Ewoks.

    Then again, I think they hang out only in Coast Redwood (sempervirens) country and have not been observed among the Big Trees (gigantea) where the picture above was taken.

    And there’s a bit of impressive old growth even more convenient to the Bay Area than Big Basin — you can tell how much more convenient by the size of the crowds it draws. Still, Muir Woods has fine impressive old trees, just one bridge and a few miles of winding road from San Francisco, and there are some off hours when the crowds are thinner. Nice place for a break when you’ve been busy negotiating a United Nations treaty in SF.

    I don’t know if its story is well known outside of the neighborhood, but there was a civic-minded plan a century ago to augment the local water supply by cutting down the trees and using the profits to finance building a dam to flood the place. The owner of the land (a developer named Kent whose name is on a couple of communities here) didn’t want that, but the developers who stood to profit were well on the way to using eminent domain for this public purpose. It turned out, though, that it could be really hard to beat up on a friend of Teddy Roosevelt. The fresh new National Monuments law was just what he needed to accept this gift to the nation.

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  3. Rattus Norvegicus's avatar Rattus Norvegicus says:
    June 19, 2013 at 8:21 pm

    Spent a fair amount of time there, Calaveras Big Trees, Yosemite, Prairie Creek, Redwoods National Park, Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, and groves in Big Sur and the Santa Cruz Mountains. The damn things never cease to amaze me. If you are ever in the Bay Area check out Big Basin State Park, they’ve got some big boys there.

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