Next up…another hike

This next hike was a bit of a stinker to find in that you took a little side road for about 4 miles.  Only the road wasn’t marked at all!  The only reason we turned onto it was a lucky guess and a little divine help.  And until you reach the trail 15 or 20 minutes later you are spending all your time wondering if you are indeed on the right road.  It was on this road we passed the most crazy and rude drivers of our trip, not fun in Big Bertha, Mark’s name for our 12 passenger van.

Once we got to “The Big Tree Area, Day Use” everyone got some extra drinks because the day was really heating up, especially for those of us carrying small children in packs.  The little kids were extra excited to cross Bull Creek, because the “bridge” there was just a few planks of wood and some rocks to hop on so  you wouldn’t get your feet wet.  Kids and water…..a never ending attraction.  Luckily no one fell in or got their feet too wet for hiking.  This trail was neat because along the river bank there were no other trees and so you got an impressive view of the redwood trees with out being among them.

Giant Tree was our first stop here…even more impressive than the last tree with a big sign.

This hike had much more undergrowth and so the trail was nice and cool, but very hard to take pictures in.  We saw our first deer on this trail.

I’m not sure who picked up a “walking stick” first, Neil or Spencer….but these pictures still make me laugh.  And naturally Isaac consequently needed a stick too.

Although as I recall, Isaac didn’t get to keep his stick too long because he kept whacking Ken with it.  Another sweet find on this trail was a bird’s nest in a tree that had the top broken off and had received some fire damage.

There are a lot of downed trees on this trail and even they are impressive.  Flat Iron Tree is one of the most famous.  And the dimensions on the cross section sign read 7.5 feet one way and 17.5 feet the other way!  So crazy!

After this trail we had another potty break and crossed the street to the Addie Johnson Trail, which we decided not to hike after all.  Here are a couple of other pictures from another hike….I just can’t remember which one.  So many of the trails were not even marked… it was just frustrating trying to find where we were.  And silly us, we had our Nikon camera, Ken’s phone and my phone….all of which have different time stamps on pictures from the same place.

Our last stop before dinner was an effort to find where they had filmed part of the Star Wars movies.  The descriptions I had found sounded easy enough to follow, but we ended up turning around and just guessing since again, there were no signs.  We didn’t end up finding the trail at all but we did see some some of the best fairy rings on our trip.  In some of them you could see small remains of the decaying mother tree in the middle of the ring of new trees.

That was it for day two.