Holiday season brings new adventures! I headed to California to see my family for Christmas, as I do most years, but this year I brought Felix! My family is still pretty covid cautious and wanted me to quarantine for a few days after the plane ride, so I used that time to check off another park on my bucket list: Redwood National Park. I’ve decided that one of my life goals is to see all the US national parks. This is motivated partially by my love of the outdoors and natural beauty, and partially because I got a water bottle where you put a sticker on it for every park you’ve been to, and I really want more stickers. 

Felix and I woke up bright and early at 3am so we could board our 5am flight to San Francisco. Upon arriving, we rented a car and drove up north. We first stopped at Russian Gulch State Park in Mendocino. This park is known for having a cool bridge that goes over a beach. The park was pretty empty due to it being a Thursday in December. We were the only people on the beach and of course we got in some beach acro. 

The park has a hiking (really just walking) area around the cliffs. In this area, the waves have really worn into the coast and created a bunch of cool sea caves and arches. It wore away into the land deep enough to create a hole that the park calls “The Devil’s Punch Bowl.” It just looked like a regular beach and didn’t have any cool crashing waves so it wasn’t that interesting. 

What was interesting was the waves crashing on the sea cliffs. It was pretty mesmerizing watching big waves come and crash against the rocks and into sea caves. We walked out onto the rocks to get a better view. At one point, I was standing out on a rock, hoping to get a picture where it looked like I was controlling the water as the waves crashed, when a big wave hit the rock and sent a huge splash over the rock and soaked me. I didn’t even get the picture I wanted because Felix got distracted in fearing for my life. 

Next we stopped at a glass beach in Fort Bragg. It, as advertised, had sand with lots of little pieces of sea glass. Makes you wonder how much trash they’ve been dumping in the ocean to get this beach… We didn’t stay long because the sand was the only attraction and we still had a lot of driving to do. 

We kept heading north on winding roads that lead along cliffs and through forests with no cell service. We stopped for dinner at a restaurant that google said was “busier than usual” but we were the only people there. Finally we made it to our hotel in Eureka where we got some very needed rest. Felix said there were a lot of similarly priced hotels in Eureka but he picked this one because it had a koi pond. Good call.

In the morning we said hello to the koi, got some breakfast, and drove up to Redwood National and State Parks. The park is a combination of one national park and three state parks that combined resources to function as one park. We stopped by the southern-most visitor center to grab a map and pick up some post cards, then headed to our first hike. Along the way we spotted some elk in a meadow. Elk are a well known attraction in the park and we lucked out to have spotted some so quickly.

Our first hike was called Fern Canyon and it follows a stream through a canyon with ferns all along the high walls. It’s so cool, it was used as a filming location in Jurassic Park. The hike is known for having walls that are perpetually dripping, but that wasn’t surprising because it had been raining all morning. The hike is particularly fun because as you go, you have to keep crossing the stream by balancing on logs and jumping on rocks. The canyon walls are also super cool. 

This hike it supposed to be a loop and you eventually get to a point where a path through the woods takes you back to the starting point. At that point, there was a stair case that appeared to lead straight into the stream, which we thought was funny. Felix and I were having so much fun on this hike that we just turned around and headed back down the stream. 

We hiked back to the car and then drove north through the park. We had a small moment of worry when we started to run out of gas and had no cell phone service and no idea where the next gas station would be. We took an exit to go to a gas station that ended up being closed but right next to it was a yard with two emus. Very random. Felix was excited to see them but I didn’t even get out of the car because I’ve seen enough emus in my life. We eventually found a place to stop for gas and lunch and then kept driving north. As we went, we saw a place on the side of the road called “Trees of Mystery” that had a huge wood carving of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox. 

Felix had read about the place so we decided to stop and explore it. It’s a tourist attraction, not part of the national park, that has trails through the redwoods and is kind of supposed to be a monument to Paul Bunyan. The trails feature a number of wood carvings, some of which were depicting scenes from Paul Bunyan’s life. My favorite of the wood carvings was this one that showed people harvesting trees while riding on giant rats.

The most notable thing about Trees of Mystery, and the real reason we stopped here, is that they have a network of treehouses built into the redwoods, with bridges that allow you to cross between them. It’s exactly like an Ewok village from Star Wars and you know they’re aware of that because there was a wood carving of Yoda in one of the tree houses. These were super cool.

The park also had a gondola that took you through the trees to the top of a hill. It was a slow ride and I didn’t think it actually gave an interesting perspective on the trees. Redwoods are cool from the ground because you can see how tall they are. When you’re up high, they just look like regular trees. I also thought the view from the top platform where the gondola took you was not that great. I kept commenting to Felix about how the gondola must’ve been expensive to construct–since it went up a pretty steep slope and they would’ve needed to clear trees and build access roads–all for something that wasn’t that cool. 

At this point it was getting late in the day. There’s still a lot more park up north but we figured we didn’t have time to see it in the sunlight so we stopped at a nearby beach that was supposed to have tide pools. At first it didn’t seem like much but as we went deeper into the rocks we found some anemones (mostly closed ones) and some starfish. We had to do a lot of hopping around on rocks before we got to the good stuff. I spotted a starfish and was excited to have found one. Then Felix spotted a clump of three starfish. Then we got to an area where we just started spotting starfish everywhere. We saw a dozen in total. 

The tide was coming in while we were doing this and we eventually noticed that our route to the shore was slightly more submerged than when we started. We made it safely back to shore with Felix only once slipping and dunking his shoe in the water. We then headed back to Eureka for a good night’s rest. 

The next day we spent almost two hours driving the northern most part of the park, which has a lot of old growth forest with the really big trees. We did a hike called Stout Memorial Grove, which is popular for being pretty short and easy while having big trees. It indeed did have big trees. 

We had to drive down a dirt road through the forest to get to Stout Memorial Grove and we continued down this road to get to another popular hike called Grove of Titans. I had heard about this hike from a youtube video but I couldn’t find it on the park map. We went to the visitor center before hand and I asked about the hike, saying I didn’t see it on the map, and the park ranger said “that’s because it’s not on the map.” Then he took out a stamp and stamped my map with the location of the Grove of Titans. I thought it was funny that it’s clearly something they get asked a lot, but they don’t put it on the maps so it’s like an insiders-only thing that you have to know to ask about. 

This hike was an out and back hike where you hike through the forest for a mile before you get to the actual Grove of Titans, which, as you would expect, had big trees. I wanted to do this hike because I knew the area in the actual Grove of Titans was a boardwalk, and I love boardwalk hikes, but I wasn’t that impressed by the grove. Once you’ve seen a couple big trees, they stop being that interesting. There was maybe one of them that I thought was impressively big. 

Having had our fill of big trees, we headed back to Eureka in search of something else to do. We went to the city’s small zoo which had some flamingoes, black bears, barn yard animals, and other things that I assume aren’t too complicated to care for. The zoo advertised having red pandas but we didn’t actually see them which was disappointing. They did have river otters that were very cute and we got to see one swimming around for like a minute before it retreated to a part of their enclosure we couldn’t see. 

The zoo also had a cool walkway among the redwoods (which was ADA accessible) and you could see some of the animal’s enclosures from it. 

I took a funny picture in a life-sized bald eagle’s nest. 

That was it for Eureka. The next day we made the long drive south back to the bay area. We made one stop along the way at a weird roadside attraction called Confusion Hill, where I saw a cat! You know I’ll always include pictures of the cats I see. Can you spot it?

Confusion hill had some wood carvings but most notably it had a building called the Gravity House which was built into the side of a hill and designed to confuse your sense of up and down. It had a spot where you could stand on a wall and a surface where you placed a golf ball and it appeared to roll uphill. I thought it was fun.

We made it back to San Francisco and dropped off our rental car at the airport. Ty picked us up at the airport dressed as a pickle, which was his “chauffeur uniform,” and drove us to my grandma’s house where we met up with my family and had some delicious home-made food. Most of you reading this were there so I won’t go into detail on our Christmas festivities. This blog is supposed to be about travel! 

After Christmas we drove down to Morro Bay and stopped at Pinnacles National Park along the way. Pinnacles is known for it’s cool rock formations and caves. We went to the west side of the park (it has an east and a west side that are not connected) so we could do a hike called the Balconies Caves and Balconies Cliffs trail. There are two hikes through caves at Pinnacles and I chose this one because it’s more rugged and involves climbing over rocks–the other one is easier and has stairs. 

The trail is a loop and we started with the cliffs side. We hiked upward and had a nice view of the rocks. Felix and I got our classic stacks photo (for you non-acrobats, this move is called stacks). Ty and I got our classic sibling photo.

We stopped to eat lunch by a stream and then got to the cave part. The caves in this park are formed from boulders piling up on each other after volcanic eruptions. There was a stream flowing through the cave and it was completely dark in parts. Thankfully we stopped at a sporting goods store to buy headlamps beforehand. I was advised by a youtuber to do this hike clockwise because then you end up doing a lot of upward climbing instead of having to climb down. That advice ended up being really useful. Everyone we encountered was doing the hike in the other direction and they seemed to be struggling to climb down slippery rocks. Most of them didn’t have headlamps and were trying to hold up their phone flashlights as they climbed. 

Ty does rock climbing and he seemed to be having a blast climbing around. He would sometimes opt for more difficult routes just for the fun of it. The final portion of the caves was a squeeze between some rocks. In total it only took about 20 minutes to go through the caves. We thought about reversing and going back through but we figured we’d get stuck behind too many slow families. 

This whole hike is not super long (only 1.8 miles) and as we were hiking back towards the parking lot, we realized we needed a bit more adventure. They advertise that a lot of people do rock climbing in the park and there are a number of side trails that are supposed to lead to climbing spots. We followed one of these trails just to try to get higher into the rocks. We ended up climbing to the top of a rock that was high and steep enough to even make me nervous. My mom would have fainted. There was a nice view up there. 

We safely descended and made it back to the parking lot. We stopped by the visitor center but it was closed, which was disappointing because I couldn’t get my postcard. This was a pretty cool park and I’d be excited to come back to explore the east side and the other cave. 

After the hike we finished the drive down to Morro Bay and stayed there for a few days. I won’t go into what we did because it wasn’t as exciting as visiting these two national parks but I do want to share that one day we went down to the harbor and there were soooo many sea otters. We saw probably two dozen. Many of them had babies. Very cute. I never know how to end a blog post. Bye!