Seeing the California old growth redwoods has been on my bucket list for a long time and today my bride and myself went to Hendy state Park and saw them. Wow!
What boggles my mind is how these monsters were logged before modern logging equipment. Would love to go back in time to see it done.
In the meantime, spend a little time on youtube and you can see many old videos of loggers handling these things years ago. You can also locate plenty of photos. I also have a big calendar with every month having a large picture but then, I think I have lots of old photos on file somewhere too. Love looking at them.
Yeah we were out there last summer when we drove cross-country. Those things are massive! I kept wondering how many years' worth of firewood would be in one tree - but I didn't have my saw and getting it back to Virginia would be a beast of a problem. You should check out the giant sequoias out there if you haven't already.
Lots of firewood for sure! I have a hard time imaging how to cut one down, split and haul it though? The forest fires have Sequoias State park off limits, so we switched our plans and went north to see the northern coastal redwoods.
That's gonna be my as yet unplanned vacation sometime before Fall 2016 - a trip to Nor Cal/Southern Oregon to see the big ones....
Two things that I find very impressive about the Redwood trees. The amount of water they must move through them in order to keep the try hydrated. Their seeds require forest fires to germinate.
The bark is thick. Those trees have survived many forest fires over the centuries by being protected by that bark.
Saw a bit on the news the other day about monitoring the redwoods for stress in the midst of the current drought, the number I remember is ~700 gallons a day for the average large tree. Seems many of the trees are showing drought stress as high as the scientists have ever measured.
Saw a show a numberof years ago that explained how some of the large west coast trees survive even when they grow beyond the trees capacity to pump water to the top. It is all location, location, location. Those tall trees grow close to the cost where there is a lot of fog that rolls in and the trees get their water from the fog.
As we drove through the back roads of northern California, we saw both old growth and second generation redwoods, some on private land some on public. Imagine owning a wood lot with big redwoods? There is a lot of them from what I saw. And there are a lot of redwoods in general over hundreds of miles of coastal private and public Forrest, more than I thought. Lots of huge stumps too as a reminder of the big ones that were cut down years ago by hand. Hard to wrap your head around cutting trees this large by hand without paved roads and transporting them. Crazy... Here's a few more pics... As I said before, this is something I dreamed of seeing for many years now. Also got to see the Northern pacific coast and Somoma... It's another world....
Great pics Fanatical1 ... I can see why you wanted to get to see them in person. Must make ya feel awful small standing beside em.
