he John Muir National Monument is located north of San Francisco, just across the world famous, "destroyed in every disaster movie ever made" Golden Gate Bridge. If you're not from the Bay Area, or even if you are but haven't explored it much, you probably think of it as entirely civilized and covered by roads and housing.  You'd be wrong.

There are fast tracks of land, many square miles worth of untouched wilderness, within 20 or 30 miles of downtown San Francisco or Oakland.  One of the best of these is the John Muir Redwoods, a National Park located deep in a valley, where constant rain water run off from the higher hills creates a rain forest, one that's absolutely infested with plant life, and the most famous California trees of all, the titanic redwoods, the tallest trees on earth.

I don't know the entire history of the park or location, but while we were walking through the woods, my dad speculated that perhaps this location was saved from being deforested due to the extremely rugged, hilly, treacherous terrain.  Too hard to get trucks in there to drag away the megaton trees, perhaps?  I dunno, but whatever the reason, it's great that it survived the good old days of unregulated clear cutting that Dubya is trying to hard to bring back to our national parks.

The park is accessible only by driving down a long, very windy canyon road.  There are hiking trails on many of the hills around the area, as well as a few small inns and restaurants on the road leading towards the park.  There are also various run down white trash domiciles surrounded by rotting cars up on cement blocks in thickets of weeds as high as a wild pig's eye, but it's better if we don't dwell on those aspects of this semi-rural section of California.

This shot was taken from inside the car, on the windy road down into the canyon.  You can't tell perfectly from this, but the clouds were gorgeous, crawling over the heavily-wooded ridges and moving along through the trees.  No white trash redneck tumbledown dwellings are visible in this angle.

The parking lot is right in front, and very small. On the rainy weekend in February we were there, every spot was full except for the half dozen long spaces for buses.  All of which were entirely devoid of buses, and judging by the deep layer of pollen and fallen leaves and blossoms across them, had been empty for some time.  Fortunately there was another, much larger parking lot not too far down the road.

The path up to the park was gorgeous; pavement bordered by a wooden fence that they must have to replace due to rot about every four months, given how wet the air and ground was. 

These shots are from the path that ran parallel to the road, from the lower parking lot to the park entrance. The moss on the trees was constant through the entire place, and quite pretty.  It was hard to say how healthy the weird, gnarled, meandering trees were; it was February so the foolish deciduous trees were leafless, despite the fact that the weather here is never so cold that they'd freeze.  But they appeared to be alive, despite the thick coating of green moss over every near-horizontal limb. I'll have to return in the summer or later in the spring and see if the moss persists all year, and what the trees look like with leaves on them.

Moss galore, eh?  And yes, there's the actual parking lot!

One thing you don't see from the outer road and parking lot are any actual redwood trees.  Just smaller, very gnarled and weird moss-covered trees.

Further up the path you come to the bathrooms, which I thought were worth a picture just for the amount of moss on the roof. Across the path is a ranger lodge and gift shop and ticket booth. There are some pretty cool science project style miniatures of the park, showing elevation, tree locations, the land down to the ocean, and more.  I wanted to get tiny little orc and human figures and have them fight through the forest.

They charge $3 a head for adults, which isn't too steep though it's a very small park, relatively speaking. Of course the ticket booth is over to the right, part of a small gift shop (there's a larger one inside), and there's absolutely nothing to keep you from walking straight through the entrance.  It's as you see below, and that's dad standing beside all you get to see of Malaya.

The path inside is much like this for about a mile, until it ends and dirt begins, where several paths lead off, snaking up and over the hills.  We walked up one of them; and it's pictured towards the end of this page.

The really impressive redwoods are along the main path though.

About the first redwoods you see, across the stream behind the bathrooms, before you enter the actual park itself. Not the biggest ones, and you can hardly see them across the path and through the undergrowth.  They're certainly not the 300 foot tall types either.  But out here the ground is relatively flat and accessible from the road, so maybe dad's theory that the inner groves survived until environmental protection laws and state parks came along is valid. They logged the ones outside, back in the 1800s, but never penetrated up the steep hills and over the ravines to get to the inside ones.  And these out here are just 100 or 150 or 200 years old, which is barely getting started for such massive trees.

Another possibility is the fire. All of the big trees were blackened up 20 or 30 feet, where it wasn't grown over by moss.  We wondered how long since it had burned, and figured just a few years, since the black still looked so obvious.  Imagine our surprise when we found a plaque eventually, and it said the last fire damage there occurred 150 years ago.  Amazing that the trees remained black for so long, and amazing that way back in 1860 or so, they didn't all burn down.

There's a rushing brook, practically a river where it passes the parking lot, and the park has various signs discussing the potential for salmon runs up the stream, as they return to their upland streams to spawn.  I didn't see any and it wasn't the right time of year for that, and frankly, I'm suspicious.  The stream was about ten feet across and two feet deep, and that was at the very edge of the park, across a green patch from the parking lot walkway.  Higher up it grew much shallower and narrower and steeper, and I couldn't see fish making much headway up such a narrow stream, especially one that must dry up to nothing or almost nothing in the summer.

The bigger they are, the longer they fall. All through the park there were 100+ foot trees lying sideways.  When they fell up hills or sideways or into other trees and didn't cross the path, they were left to rot and provide eye candy. Other places tree trunks thicker than cars rose out of the wilderness and approached the road until they were cut in half on one side of the path, and then resumed on the other side, cruising off into the distance.  What do they do with the slices they remove in the middle? Good question.

I loved the small, twisted, moss-covered tiny trees squatting in clearings amidst the majestic towering redwoods. As numerous photos will attest.

Just a generally cool shot of redwoods, with a tree sprouting a dragon-like mane of ferns in the foreground.

The day was cloudy, with a very light mist and low clouds occasionally floating past, making for great ambience, but very poor photographic conditions.  As for these trees, I love that X shape, and I have no idea why these trees go sideways so much as they're getting started, before shooting up at a nearly vertical angle once they get past 8 or 10 feet.  Perhaps the move sideways until they find a place with better sunlight, and then grow up from there?

The requisite "damn them things are tall" shot.  I tried about fifteen shots looking up at the towering trees, but none of them are very good.  I need a wider lens, or a better vantage point, or more photographic skill, since the scale of things was never very clear.  Even this photo begins at least 20 feet up, and doesn't even get the tips of the trees. But trust me, this was the best of the dozen plus I took.

I'm sure a botanist would have a lot of fun out there, since besides the redwoods, there were tons of other trees, ferns and other undergrowth, and lots of fungus and vines and such.  These mushrooms were about the most colorful we saw. And no, I have no idea how quickly they'd kill you if you ate them.

Here's another shot of Malaya and dad, side by side, as they enjoy the sights.  I loved these weird, twisting, moss-shrouded trees, and took far too many photos of them, hoping some would come out.  Click this pic to see a close up of the tree they're looking at, from a side angle.

The alleged salmon stream from a bridge inside the park. This is about as wide and deep as it gets; higher up it turns into a dozen individual trickles and waterfalls tumbling down the steep hills.

A view from one of the upper paths, carved into the hillside for our exploring edification. 

Most of the way back to the main gate, traveling along the upper path, we encountered and passed between these two massive trees.  The whole upper path was rather treacherous, since it was covered in puddles, narrow, and cut into a very steep hill with no guard rails of any kind. In many places it was at least a 10 foot drop to the hillside, and it might as well have been 50 feet, since the hillside proceeded downwards at a terrible rate.  I'm talking damn near vertical, at least 70º angle.  Way, way, way steeper than you could climb without a rope or a ladder.  I kept expecting to round a corner and see some old man clinging to a sapling for dear life, a twenty foot slide mark in the muddy hillside marking his descent path.

No one fell though, at least not as far as I saw.

As for these trees, Malaya and I took turns doing our Samson impressions and making straining noises, just like every other person to pause here for a photograph since the beginning of time.

A look down from the upper hillside path, across the stream at the main boardwalk.  Click this one for a dizzying, larger view of things.

This is not from John Muir Park. It's from the coast, 30 miles south of there, south of San Francisco, along a gorgeous stretch of highway.  It's also a stretch that offers absolutely nowhere to pull over and view the ocean, since the cliffs are moving rapidly towards the road, and there's simply no room for any road side park.  Hence the lack of photos from there, other than this one lame one.

I hope to return to the Muir (red) Woods again at some point, ideally when the weather is more conducive to true color photography, and if so I'll add more photos.  Of course that's what I say on every vacation photo page.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.