Big Basin Redwoods State Park is located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about 23 miles from the city of Santa Cruz. There are over 80 miles of trails , so off we went!
Since Joni's son, Ken, (see Joni and Ken in photo) still lives in San Francisco, he joined us for a day at the park. It started out as a chilly day, but it ended up being a perfect day to hike.
We started on the Redwood Loop Trail which is where some of the tallest trees in the park are found. That was a short 1/2 mile trail. After that were took one of the longer trails which took us about 3 hours to hike.
We saw trees that were named: Mother of the Forest (see photo of sign in front of tree) and Father of the Forest.
These massive redwoods are up to 300 feet tall and 50 feet in circumference. They range from serveral hundred to 2,000 years old.
Some have hollowed trunks but are still alive. (See picture looking up from INSIDE the tree.)
Their root systems are shallow and far reaching, usually found within the top 8 feet of soil and are intertwined with those of nearby redwoods. Redwoods have thick protective bark and have the ability of draw thousands of gallons of water which makes them well adapted to survive wildfires. We saw quite a few trees that looked like they had been partly burned.Standing next to the big trees made us feel very small. We were amazed at the sizes of the trunks. We couldn't get a picture that would show how very tall they were. We couldn't get the whole tree into the picture.
After we left the park, we all went out to eat in Los Gatos. Delton used to live there BJ (Before Joni) and worked for IBM in that area. We had a great day!
