The Blanch Herd: May Vacay {Day 3: Beaches and Jed Smith}

Day 3: Monday, 3 May 2021: Not much mileage on the car today (hooray!) but a full, fun, day otherwise! Here's the recap (and more details below, of course!): Tide Pools, Jedediah Smith State Park, Pebble Beach, Fish 'n' Chips

Our plan for the day was to hit our first Redwood Park and soak in the magic of the trees. And we did that. But first we made another trip to the beach and the tide pools around the light house. The tide was out again, which meant we could cross over to the lighthouse and peek in all the pools around the edge. We found more anemones and crabs and watched a great blue heron trying to find some breakfast in the shallows.

If you squint, you can see a handful of
roughly bagel-shaped anemones on that rock
in the middle under water.

Gregg noticed these cool designs on the sand.

Wandering toward the lighthouse.

A rather large plant of some sort - is this kelp?

It was calm(er) this morning on the island.

For our info.

I was surprised to see the purple flowers
weren't opened all the way (yet?) like they were
yesterday evening.

Kelp(?) close up.

Cal's anemone find.

We saw TONS of these little buckeye-
looking crabby things, in every size you can
imagine from tiny dots on a rock to this size
and maybe bigger (about quarter-ish size).

I spy a heron toward the center of this photo.

Rocky beach (plus heron).

Love this color!

After we had our fill of the early-morning ocean (we were still on mountain time, and stayed that way for the entire trip, which came in handy for being the first ones up and out in most places), we hopped in the car and drove to Jedediah Smith State Park via the (dirt) Howland Hills Road. Our first stop was the Boy Scout Tree Trail, which was one of the top-rated trails on my trusty redwoodhikes.com site that I had found early in my research (basically, I took all of his 4 and 5 star trails and added them to a list that I built our itinerary around).

This was the longest trail of the trip, too, at almost three miles one way to the Boy Scout Tree. So while I was hoping we could make it that far, I didn't actually expect us to. I was prepared to just be happy with what we could get. And we ended up getting the whole thing! The kids were amazing hikers and we just kept walking and oohing and aahing the entire way. It truly was indescribable to feel so tiny next to those giant trees. There weren't many people on the trail on our way in (perks of that early wake up time!) and it was so peaceful and calm and still and . . . green! We saw so many fun ferns and ground-covering plants (later learned they were called redwood sorrel) and even a couple of banana slugs!

Boy Scout Tree itself turned out to be quite impressive, too, which was nice after such a long hike. We attempted to see the falls that were supposedly a short way down the opposite fork at the end of the trail, but never saw anything to write home about and abandoned that plot pretty quickly. All told we hiked about 6 miles that morning in just over 3 hours!

Whoa!

Trillium blossom and fern fronds.
Sometimes these flowers were white
and sometimes they were this purpley
color.

Completely incredible. Every single
ginormous tree!

Our necks were actually sore after our
three days in the woods.

Gregg's attempt at a vertical
pano to get the tops.

Best hikin' kids there ever were!

Such interesting trunks covered with life.

Here's a nurse log bridge - a nurse log
is a fallen tree that then allows other
plants and animals to grow and thrive as
it decays.

Simply enormous root end - but notice they're not very
deep!

Fiddleheads unfurling. (And those
clover-looking heart-leafed plants are the
sorrel.)

Nurse log underpass.

Banana Slug crossing!

Sooo cool to spot one!

I think this is a magnolia tree growing out
of a nurse log!

Funky trunks - they just keep growing and
stretching even when they get broken
or hit by lightning!

It even smelled green. :)

Crepuscular rays through the trees.

White trillium this time.

Banana slug number two! How lucky
are we?!

Fungus among us - but only on the dead
spruces, never on the redwoods.

I never would have taken the fork
to Boy Scout Tree (it didn't look like a real
trail!) so I'm glad we had these arrows
to point us the way.

Happy hikin' family who made it to
Boy Scout Tree!

Boy Scout Tree - hard to get a good
photo of since you're so close and it's so huge!

This is a tired boy!

These mushrooms looked like steps
we could have climbed up to the top
of hte tree with.

Super cool suessical plant life.

I had heard that redwood cones were small
so I wondered if this could be one. Turns
out this is hemlock. But redwoods are only
slightly bigger than these, which just
blows me away.

We made it back! Utter domination by
these two! (And with cheery attitudes the
entire way - miracles!!)

We made sure to have lots of snacks and water, but didn't have any lunch in our packs as we hiked, so by the time we made it back to the car at 1pm local time, we were pretty hungry. Gregg set up our stove and boiled some water for hot dogs and what a completely delightful post-hike meal that turned out to be!

Once we were sufficiently re-energized and rested, we continued on down the road to our next stop: Stout Grove. This was a short, less than a mile loop, through a lovely grove of gigantic trees. (A major perk of doing that mega hike first was that every other trail we attempted seemed so stinkin' short!) We took it slow through the grove, resting on the benches and detouring down to the Smith River to throw rocks. We were close to the campground here, and I would definitely come back to camp and swim or kayak in that spot!

Lunchtime!!

Handy kitchen set up worked like a charm
in the parking lot at the trailhead.

Stout stump.

This is The Stout Tree.
I thought the grove name must be descriptive
of the size and shape of the tree trunks, but
actually it was named after a person, Mr. Frank D. Stout,
who was actually (ironically?) the president of a logging company, but
his wife donated the trees to the Save the Redwoods League
and named the tree (and grove) after him.

Yes, I was lying on the platform
next to the tree to get this vertical
panoramic shot.

The Smith River was gorgeous and calm and looked
like such a fun place to splash and play on a hot summer
day.

Those tall trees in the back? Redwoods. And there's not
really much of a hill to get up to them. They're just THAT
tall.

See the kayaks? So fun!

World's tallest snake grass!

A covered bridge on our way out of the park!

We loved the trees, but the kids were itching for more beach time. We headed to Pebble Beach where they ran screamed and chased birds and splashed in the waves (and got their pants soaked!) and ran and ran and ran. (Remember that 6 mile hike earlier?) The parents were cold (it was SUPER windy!) and tired and ambled along behind them. Eventually we decided it was time for dinner and we wanted fish 'n' chips! We tried a place up the highway into Oregon, but they wouldn't ever answer their phone so we turned back around toward Crescent City and discovered a fish shop slash deli right across the stree from our hotel on the harbor . . . with a sea lion colony! Done! I called in the order of fish 'n' chips, shrimp, and clam chowda and we picked it up a few minutes later. We parked next to the sea lions but stayed in the car to eat since the wind was still whippin' and making it chilly. Pretty fun and tasty dinner and a show and a great end to a simply marvelous day!