Found It!!

Archimedes may have shouted out this when discovering that his body mass in his bath caused the water level to increase, a piece of mathematical genius called displacement theory used ever since in a variety of ways but it is difficult to understand why General Vallejo, one of the architects of modern day California, should have chosen Eureka for his state capital located as it is so far to the north of the state.

It may have been that at that time it was a highly busy fishing and logging port with the largest number of Victorian homes outside New England (if you believe the California guidebook).  However today it is almost wholly dependent on tourism for its survival as like much of northern California the fishing and logging industries died long ago.

Often foggy in the morning…

… it soon cleared up

We had chosen it as our base in the far north largely due to its proximity to the even further north Redwood National Park, a place Viv and I wanted to visit.  The drive there up the Pacific Coast Highway, Route 1, to Leggett where the road joined up with 101 was nothing short of spectacular, particularly the change from rugged coastline north of Fort Bragg to winding switchback roads through thick forests that Viv behind the wheel handled most adeptly.  The last 30 miles in particular were very, very windy indeed!

At Leggett we found the ‘World Famous Drive Thru Tree’ – sorry about the spelling! – a 2400 year old Redwood called the Chandelier Tree (see website here) standing 315 feet high which years ago had been hollowed out so that cars could drive thru, I mean through, it.  One of the national park publications I picked up charmingly explained that:

“Carving through a hole through a coastal redwood reflects a time passed when we didn’t fully appreciate the significance of all organisms and their interplay with the environment.”

I don’t disagree that in the past that we’d overdone the exploitation of the environment but really there’s no need to be so preachy about it all the time nor to deny the simple enjoyment of driving through this tree, silly as it sounds (three times in our case!).  The place was packed by the way.

We skirted the Avenue of the Giants, another long stretch of scenic road we planned to drive through on our return (see website here) and soon enough ended up in Eureka where we’d booked a hotel ‘downtown’.  In retrospect this was a mistake as although the guidebooks refer to a ‘vibrant Old Town’, on that Saturday night when we searched for it, it was closed or at least seemed to be. 

However that afternoon we decided to take a look around the sand bar that protected the bay from the ocean and was the reason why the logging companies made Eureka their go to port in this part of the country in the old days.  Nowadays it houses the Coast Guard, Samoa Dunes National Park and the Samoa Cookhouse.

I have mentioned that our progress in California so far had been marked by epicurean behavior in spades so the prospect of dining at one of the few remaining cookhouses in California proved an irresistible prospect for us!

First though we went for a long hike along the dunes and jetty that comprised the national park.  Dating back to the mid-1800’s, a local lady we met with her dogs told us that this was one of the most dangerous ports on the coast and certainly the patch of water between the two jetties heading out into the ocean (not piers and definitely not in the class of Southend’s longest pier in the world!) was very choppy indeed.  We spotted some dolphins heading in towards the harbor which was very exciting.

The river that fed the estuary that created the harbor was a main point for ferrying logs down from the interior (no railway like at Fort Bragg).  In the past, the final mile or so to the waiting logging schooners moored offshore in the tumultuous waves was served by a gravity fed ‘railway’.  Loggers put the logs onto the trucks which free wheeled down to the boats with the trucks being hauled back up to the start point again by horses.  Not much of this now remains.

This lady was a fund of local information too but most dismissive of the local marijuana growers – ‘marijuana millionaires’ she called them.  This is big business up here too along with the tourist industry and keeps mainly the young men in employment.  The problem appears endemic now.

A furry friend

The Cookhouse was a real blast from the past.  All you can eat portions of one dish served family style for $15.95.  That night’s menu was baked ham and fried chicken with all the fixin’s you can imagine! 

Nuthin' Fancy

However that wasn’t why we were there.  We’d stopped at the national park office and a ranger had advised a couple of scenic drives and walks up and down the park.  First was in the very far north in the part of the park called the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.

The start of the Redwood National Forest

Jedediah (great name incidentally) had arrived in California from his native Kentucky with the first group of overland settlers from the east fired by the notion of vast swathes of new fertile land to the far west.  He was a ‘frontiersman’ – i.e. good with a rifle and able to live off the land – and liked it so much he stayed.  That portion of the park is 10 miles away from Crescent City -- the farthest north town in California and one of only two towns, the other being Monterey, susceptible to tsunami’s.  We’d found this out from the people we’d met in Fort Bragg who told us that the tsunami that hammered Japan a few years back also wiped out Crescent City.  We drove back through that city incidentally and it really is flat as a pancake… as well as being pretty small.  Most of the buildings are on the highway these days.

Tsunami survivor in Crescent City

The drive is on Howland Hill Road and is not road marked at all.  We knew because we asked and because we had GPS in the car – great invention by the way.  The best $150 investment you can make in my view. 

What a drive it was!  All on unpaved roads with monster first growth redwoods on both sides of the track.  Wow!!  We stopped at the shorter Stout Grove Trail to get our tree hug for the day and spent an age just sitting there taking it all in.  Spectacular isn’t the word for it.  I cannot think what is.

The next event was the 15 mile long Newton B Dury Scenic Parkway (see website here) running south of Klamath to Elk Prairie, both tiny townships, which was again full of lovely old redwoods but also Roosevelt Elk, the local large critter.  We found loads of them sitting off just grazing peacefully completely oblivious to strange humans snapping away only a few yards away.  Again the herds were split by gender  -- far more females than males.  

The final trail of the day was the Lady Bird Johnson Grove Trail just outside a township called Orick, further south.  We drove 3 miles off the highway to the 1.5 mile trail where we were advised to speak loudly as there were plenty of bears and mountain lions all around.  

Despite this threat of immediate evisceration, Viv and I spent another long period of time with these marvelous, monster trees (yes, more hugging too!) feeling quite a connection by the end (even me).

LBJ’s missus had a keen environmental interest and persuaded her hubby and then his VP, Richard Nixon, as well as then California Governor, Ronald Reagan, to dedicate some land to redwood preservation and this happened in 1969 with more acreage being added occasionally thereafter.  Great idea!

We’d been advised that the small town of Trinidad (named by Spanish sailors who landed on the coast on Trinity Sunday 300 years ago) was both cute and had some nice restaurants so we stopped at Larryman’s Restaurant for dinner.  Our friendly lady on Samoa Dunes had told us this was a nice but expensive place and curiously we found it appeared to be full of those folks she was so disapproving of. 

They could of course have been Silicon Valley millionaires up for the weekend!

What a day though.

Working Class Hero

The guide book I used to chart some of the things we wanted to do on this trip suggested that Fort Bragg was the blue collar cousin of chic Mendocino, some 10 miles further down the rugged west coast of California.  It is an old logging and fishing town, a place Steinbeck was intimately familiar with and as it was bigger and had more lodging options than Mendocino, so we ended up there.

We hadn't intended to.  We'd meant to leave Deerfield at a reasonable hour and head up 101 to Eureka, our furthest northern point on this trip, and then bimble down the coast at a reasonable pace.

However a late morning induced by poor discipline attached to some of Deerfield's finest meant that our departure time was delayed to the point where we'd be reaching Eureka at a late hour rather than mid-afternoon so we decided on the hoof to change direction and stop about half way up and as Fort Bragg had the Skunk Train, a rail line into the redwoods following the old logging trail, that was where we chose to stay.

The last 20 or so miles from Willitts on the freeway to Fort Bragg were uphill and then downhill through a redwood forest with the road clinging onto the hillsides for dear life in some places, or so it felt.

However Fort Bragg was the first place we witnessed the famous fog from these parts.  It was brown.  I've never seen brown fog before!  However it burned off around 4 pm so made for a gloriously sunny evening that enabled Viv and I to go out for a long walk along the seashore and through a small redwood grove on the outskirts of town.

Fog rolling in

Our daily redwood fix

We also had the chance to have a beer at the North Coast Brewery where we met a very friendly family from Crescent City (to the far north) who were on their bi-annual trip to the big city (San Francisco) to get their big city fix.

The train ride was the focal point of the day being a 4 hour round trip to a place called North Spur, a siding in the middle of the forest about another 2 or 3 hours from Willets, some 50 miles away.  The rolling stock ranged from 150 years old to just about 50 or 60, ours on the day was 70 years old.  Too tired, according to the genial conductor, to make the full trip to Willetts with such a load as the final bit was all through the really high mountains.

It was a wonderful trip through the forest, not a government owned park but owned by the California Lumber Company who still log the forest... but with far more regulation now than in the past.  The lumber company had sold the railway to the current owners 40 years ago because they didn't want to run a railroad any longer -- the company owns 12 feet from the centre of the railway line in both directions along the track.  Fortunately the weather has been benign for years now so the track hasn't worn as much as it could have ... in many parts it looks to be on the verge of falling down a cliff!  The conductor said rains would wash out large tracts regularly but this hasn't been the case lately.

Not much stopping the track being washed away!

The trip itself was enriched by the conductor's stories and another guy dressed in train uniform who sang railway songs to the travelers.  Both were locals and had some great stories of the old days.

The logging companies had upwards of 300 men out in the woods at any point in time at camps all along the railway.  When they went further, they added more line occasionally putting in camps in the midst of the forest (like North Spur).  The forest was widely denuded only twice in the last 100 years though; once being after the 1906 fire when San Francisco needed to be rebuilt.  The other time was during World War II when the forest was sacrificed for the war effort.  After the first time, the lumber company offered people the chance to buy 100 acres of denuded forest for $1 per acre with conditions: farm don't log, don't sub-let.  Several parcels remain who are apple farmers.  The others were bought back during the Depression by the logging company at $2 per acre.

One of the old remaining log cabins in the woods

The actual logging process was a massive enterprise encompassing not only the chopping down process itself but also its transshipment from the forest to a place where the logs could be shipped out -- this was largely before roads in the area, so shipping out of often small ports was often the only way.  Trouble was redwood logs are so water saturated and therefore heavy that they could not be carried out by ox cart or river (they would sink), hence railway.

Additionally the first 10-20 feet of the tree were particularly heavy so loggers would climb up 10 or so feet and attach a sort of platform where 2 of them would saw and hack 12 hours each day for 7-8 days per tree (with a trunk diameter of 7-8 feet, a 200 year old tree as they couldn't cut down the really big ones!) not knowing when the tree would actually fall so they were still up there on their platforms when these huge trees would fall.  Dangerous work indeed -- but they were paid $4 per day to do it.  A big payday back then!

Now its all over like the fishing.  Regulation, environmentalists and over zealous husbandry in earlier times are the collective reasons -- i.e. few fish.  So I asked the conductor what the young people do and he told me:

"One of two things.  They leave or grow marijuana.  There's 100,000 acres of marijuana out there in the forest.  Young fellers can earn upwards of $100,000 a year just by growing a few plants".

I can believe it as marijuana smells are everywhere.  Apparently there's a license that can be obtained, a 2-15 license someone told me, that enables people to grow marijuana for their own personal use.  But that definition is often/always abused so there are endless numbers of 'Herb' shops around, even in the smallest villages.  It really does seem endemic these days.

Regulation and other well meaning initiatives often have unintended consequences.  As a finance person I do wonder what will become of the banking and finance industry with the ever growing list of capital restrictions.  The immediate reaction has been the curtailment of retail and small business lending.  Where will those people go for their finance needs?

After the Skunk Train, we headed off to the Mendocino Botanical Gardens (see website here) to stroll among the rhododendron gardens.  They were just coming into bloom, in a few weeks they will be even more magnificent.

They were actually pretty magnificent anyway!

I was disappointed with Mendocino, in retrospect possibly unfairly.  First of all it is tiny (but then again so many other named towns are tiny too) and the weather had started to grey and get chilly.  We'd experienced fantastic weather to this point so this may have stained my impression.  It looked to be 2 streets down to the water and 3 across all with artsy enterprises selling I'm not sure what.  The place certainly didn't leave a good impression with me anyway.

Our final decision was dinner and Noyo Harbour back in Fort Bragg where we saw some otters swim up the river competing no doubt for the fish we were eating.  Sorry guys, today you lost!

Tomorrow we head north…again!