In My Life

When we got on the bus with four other people I was thinking, “Well not many people are interested in natural beauty and 800 year old trees any more!” But as we went on the bus filled and by the time we got there it was like Woodstock – literally thousands had come by car, by bike, on foot. And what a place! The only word that comes to mind, and I rarely use it, is awesome.
Our first bus driver from the city was a glamorously dressed black woman, with Afro, jewelry, and enormous sunglasses. She could have been a jazz singer or ancient rock star. She took us over the Golden Gate Bridge to the shuttle bus.
I was executing the Muir Woods to be a little clump of Redwoods, instead it’s a huge forest with creeks running through it. Salmon swim up stream from the ocean to spawn here. The trees need to be seen to be believed, the sunlight breaking through and the quiet of the forest need to be experienced. There were only a few moments of that silence because foreigners talked loudly most of the time, unaware of the signs calling for quiet.
It was a mission to get here, the hairpin bends hair-raising, but well worth it! I took a stack of photos because it was hard to resist.
By the way, these redwoods are the tallest and oldest living things on earth. Some are 800+ years old, 85+ metres high, and 4 metres wide. Each one needs 50 gallons of water a day. Because of the dryness of California they would not get nearly enough water to live except for the fogs that roll in from the Pacific dropping their dew all over this forest. Amazing, hey?

This entry was posted on October 13, 2012 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.