Start Location: Garberville, CA
Ending Location: Crescent City, CA
Miles Today: 161
Trip Miles: 1654
States Visited: 3
National Parks Visited: 3
Low Temp: 58.0° F
High Temp: 70.7° F
Min Elevation: -13'
Max Elevation: 1280'
Route Map:
Pinnacle NP 2023 - Day 07
All is well with the world, well mostly all. We still have a broken
speedometer and I have sort of a sore shoulder from
constantly twisting the throttle on twisting roads. And I forgot to
mention I got stung by a bee at the hotel in Santa Rosa. They have
beautiful gardens and as we were walking through them to get to the hot
tub a yellow jacket got me on the wrist. Fortunately I have some
benadryl and a steroid anti-itch cream both of which seem to help a
little.
We started the day with short ride to the Avenue of the Giants
which is a 31 mile ride through massive redwoods. The only glitch was
that we got 3 miles into the road and the road was closed - not exactly
sure why. Fortunately we were able to get back to 101 and several miles
down the road there was another access point past the blockage. The
road mostly parallels Highway 101 and is an officially state maintained
road. It's really impressive to drive through miles and miles of
massive trees. Traffic was very light so we were able to putter along
and enjoy the ride and the views.
From there we headed to the Redwoods National Park which is just a ways up Highway 101. Our first stop was the Thomas H. Kuchel Visitor Center.
We ate our lunch there, meandered through the Center and walked down to
the Pacific Ocean. We still wanted a short hike so we road to Elk
Meadows and took the short hike to Trillium Falls. It's one thing to
see the trees from a vehicle but it'd totally different to stand beside
them. There are a couple of pictures on the hike with Linda standing
next to trees for perspective.
After that we headed to Crescent City where we had a room for the night.
We
will drive to Bend tomorrow and then figure out where we go from there.
We're thinking of Wenatchee the following night and then heading home
from there via the North Cascades Highway.
