I parked our car next to Howland Hill Road and walked out into the redwood forest. It was early morning, 52 degrees with a low overcast. Twisting, lichen-covered broadleaf trees grew among an understory filled with ferns and berry bushes. Everything was green except for rhododendrons with clumps of pink flowers on their branch tips and a few wildflowers like salal, red clintonia, and inside-out flower. The massive gray trunks of redwoods rose out of the vegetation, their tops disappearing into the mist 200 feet above us.
- Start/End: Howland Hill Road, 41.7876, -124.0669
- Route: River Trail, Stout Grove Trail, Mill Creek Trail, Howland Hill Road, Stout Grove Trail, River Trail
- Distance: about 6 miles
- Elevation gain: nearly flat
- Highlights: river views, lush old-growth redwood forest
Elizabeth and I left the dirt Howland Hill Road on the River Trail, descending a hillside above the banks of the Smith River. After a half mile we reached the Stout Grove, a floodplain forest where the conditions are perfect for growing huge redwoods: Many of the trees were over 300 feet high with trunks over 10 feet in diameter.
It was still 8 in the morning and and we had the grove to ourselves. The fallen trees lying on the forest floor were big enough that we could climb up and walk on them. Gardens of mosses, ferns, and tiny wildflowers grew on top of these giant logs and we watched our step to avoid disturbing the little plants.
We walked through the Stout Grove until we reached Mill Creek, a riffling stream some 10 feet wide and no more than a foot deep. We were at its mouth, where it drained into the much larger Smith River.
The bridge that crosses the creek during the summer wasn’t installed yet and there were no boulders or logs we could use to keep our feet dry, so we took off our shoes, put our feet down on the cold pebbles, and walked into the bracing water. It was swift enough that we had to face upstream to keep our balance, but we got across without problems.
While we sat down on the other side to put our shoes back on, a little slate gray bird flitted onto some branches hanging over the creek, its tail bobbing up and down as it examined the water: an American dipper, or water-ouzel.
The park would be crowded later, but we were alone now and the lack of a bridge meant that few would follow us.
We walked along the gray pebble banks of the Smith River looking for the Mill Creek Trail. The river was slow and wide, some hundred yards across, turquoise near its edges and cobalt blue in the middle. The low clouds seemed to make the world smaller, sheltering us in the wilderness. Across the river was a forest just like ours, it’s profile a dark green wall hundreds of feet high. Some of the trees had typical Christmas-tree tops, but many ended in ragged leafless spires broken and worn by centuries of storms.
After a minute or two we found an old staircase that took us back into the woods and onto the Mill Creek Trail. The trail was narrow and hugged the land, rising over every hill and turning around every tree. This gave us good opportunities to admire the little wildflowers like redwood sorrel and common monkeyflower. The trees included enormous redwood and Douglas-fir as well as smaller Western hemlock. There were also large and plentiful tanoak here, unlike the trail to Devil’s Punchbowl, where it was stunted by disease. We noticed more dead hemlocks that we did redwood or Douglas fir. Could that have been because the hemlocks are shorter lived? Western hemlock typically live only 400 or 500 years, whereas Douglas-fir can live for 1,000 years and redwood can live for 2,000 years.
We heard the out-of-control song of a winter wren through the forest, but it’s a tiny brown bird, and we never saw it among all the vegetation. We also heard the buzzing individual notes of the varied thrush, a robin-like bird with bold black and orange markings.
The trail descended onto a flat next to the creek where the vegetation was exuberant in the moist, still air. Bigleaf maple trees with pale-green leaves grew out of the ferns and sorrel, their twisting trunks and branches covered in olive moss. Behind them, huge gray redwoods rose into the fog.
We walked past a fallen redwood that was so big and so covered in vegetation that at first we thought it was a small cliff. Ferns, shrubs, even whole trees, grew from it and spread their branches over the trail.
What did this redwood look like when it was alive? We didn’t have to wonder for long. Walking around to the other side of the fallen tree we saw another just like, it still standing.
I thought of the original immensity of these forests, beginning at the hills near the Pacific Ocean, stretching past our secluded creek, then over wild boulder-strewn rivers and around rocky mountain tops before finally fading into sagebrush plains 75 miles east. Much of this original forest has been logged, but some of it still exists, right here in Jed Smith and again in the Siskiyou Wilderness.
We crossed Howland Hill Road and continued on the trail a while before stopping for a snack. This was our turn-around point and would end our reverie. After eating, we walked back along the road, crossing Mill Creek. The clouds started breaking up, and sunlight began to filter through the redwoods. The park was starting to fill up and cars rattled by on the potholed dirt road, raising dust.
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