April 10 – April 13, 2023
After leaving Woodlands, we drove through Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument. The road took us through green hills, with flowers and trees in bloom. We saw plenty of Californian orange poppies and blue lupins. Sadly we also saw the ravages caused by the winter snow storms and earlier floodings which left lots of debris, branches and rocks all around.
We had some fog on the way to Mendocino and Russian Gulch State Park ( south of Fort Bragg). We are now in Redwood country and we did a hike to Fern Canyon. Nice walk ( 8km) going through a forest of Redwood and Ponderosa trees, ending at a waterfall.
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We continued on to the scenic road called “Avenue of the Giants” , a 31 mile road running through Humboldt Redwoods State Park. It is named after the coastal redwoods that tower over the route. We stopped at the Visitor Centre and then headed for the Drury-Chaney Grove where we did a nature loop trail ( 2.4 miles), with tall redwoods towering over us. It was windy and we could see the tops swinging and sometimes crashing into each other with broken branches falling down!
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We stopped for the night in Fort Jones, a nice little town, where we camped for the night in the local baseball team stadium car park. There was a toilet block with hot water and could get access to free local wifi !
The next morning we were on our way to Oregon and Crater Lake National Park.
