And The ADVENTURE Continues...: June 28, 2015 Anniversary, Redwoods and an adventure to Shelter Cove

Sunday , June 28, 2015

Today is our 24^th wedding anniversary and we really don’t have anything planned. We are just going to be spontaneous today. It was our turn to drive thru the Redwoods to pick up Jeff and Amy. We are going to make a few stops along the way. Our first stop was to show the car going through a tight spot coming out of our campground. which is in the post before this one. I will take another picture with the motor home coming through it tomorrow morning. We stopped to see the Founder’s Tree which is 346.1 feet high, circumference is 40 feet. This tree was dedicated in September 1931 to the Founders of the Save the Redwood League. Next on this .6 mile loop we saw the Dyerville Giant. Unfortunately it was no longer standing but its root system was impressive. Before it fell in 1991 it was at least 362 feet, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty. It is 17 feet in diameter, 52 feet in circumference and probably weighs over a million pounds. Imagine hearing that fall must of felt like an earthquake. The reason this tree may have fallen is that they had a lot of rain so the ground was saturated and another tree had fallen and hit this one. They do not have very strong root systems. For being so big their root system only goes down 8-12 feet.

We then stopped off at the Visitor Center. It was shortly before 11am and this place was already packed. This was one of the best centers we have been in. There were so many things to see that we could have spent a couple of hours or more watching films and just going through all of the history that they have in this little building. The most impressive part to me was the travel log made by Charles Kellogg. It is a Redwood Motor Home and it weighs 6 tons. It is all one piece of redwood and the estimate the age of this wood to be about 4000 years old. It has water, electricity, living room, kitchen, toilet and bedroom. I estimated to be about 20’ long. I think it was a great work of art. We also learned that there are 3 kinds of Redwoods. Two are here in United States and one is in China. We have the Coast Redwoods in Southern Oregon and Central California, Giant Sequoias in the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Dawn Redwoods in China.

We picked up Jeff and Amy and we wanted to stop off at the recycling place to get rid of all of the plastic and aluminum cans that we have been collecting. As we were waiting for the boys to get back I was looking at some brochures that we had picked up along the way and noticed a place about 28 miles away called Shelter Cove that had black sand beach. Amy and I were very interested and the boys agreed that we should go. Well we were back on mountain roads again. I am finding that these roads are not my favorite even though they give us such beautiful scenery. As we reached that top of the mountain and we were descending down towards the water the view was absolutely breathtaking. Pictures will not do this justice! As we arrived at the beach the sand was definitely dark grey to black.

The color of the sand is a result of the shale cliffs that have eroded along the beach. This is one of the few black sand beaches in the world. What a gem we found today and a GREAT anniversary present. We all agreed that this was a very worthwhile unplanned adventure.

Our last stop of the day was to drive through a Redwood tree. Can’t come to the Redwoods and not do that. As we found out our vehicle is too big to go through the tree so we stopped off and got the Bohrer’s compact vehicle. We drove through the tree that was called the Shrine Tree. There are only 3 trees that you can drive through but this was the closest to us. I would have loved to see the other 2 but maybe another time.

Our wonderful day was over. We said our goodbyes as we planned on leaving early tomorrow because we are going to get some new tires for the front of the coach and then meet up with Jeff and Amy in Grant’s Pass, Oregon. Woo Hoo another new state around the corner.