Elizabeth and I parked our car at the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park visitor center. It was 8:30 in the morning and 52 degrees with a low overcast. Tall azalea bushes near our car bloomed with sweet-smelling pink and yellow flowers. Across the road was a wide meadow ringed by deeply forested hills whose tops disappeared into the clouds. Roosevelt elk lay in the meadow, getting up only occasionally to browse. The antlers on the males were still covered in velvet.
- Start/End: Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park Visitor Center, 41.3641, -124.0231
- Route: Nature Trail, Miners’ Ridge Trail, Davidson Road, Fern Canyon Trail, James Irvine Trail, Nature Trail
- Distance: 11.5 miles
- Elevation gain: 2,000 feet
- Highlights: old-growth redwood and Sitka spruce forests, fern canyon, beach, wild Roosevelt elk
Once the rest of our group, from the San Francisco Sierra Club, arrived, we started our hike. We walked past the azaleas and into the forest on the Nature Trail, which began as a boardwalk whose sides wrapped around 6-foot redwood trunks. Below the boardwalk was the meandering Prairie Creek, its banks lined with bushes, ferns, and small trees. Above the boardwalk, but still well below the redwood canopy, were bigleaf maples with moss-covered branches and big light-green leaves.
We left the creek on the Miners’ Ridge Trail and headed uphill.
Small wildflowers like redwood sorrel, deer foot, starflower, trillium, and wild lily of the valley filled the forest floor, joined by great bursts of ferns.
I also saw false Solomon’s seal, salal, and Smith’s and Hooker’s fairy bells. These all looked generally the same: creeping plants with alternate, oval leaves ending in sharp tips. But they did have distinct flowers that helped me tell them apart: false Solomon’s seal had white bursts of flowers on panicles; salal had pearly urn-shaped flowers hanging from racemes; the fairy bells had flowers hanging directly from their stems, but Smith’s flowers were white and cylindrical, whereas Hooker’s flowers were greenish and spreading at their bottoms.
The forest was open enough for us to see giant trunks rising out of the understory for a considerable distance. These were redwood and Douglas-fir, which looked incongruously large among the other, normal-sized plants. From unseen corners of the forest we heard the chattering song of the diminutive winter wren. We also heard the songs of both the varied and hermit thrushes, the former’s song mechanical, the latter’s ethereal.
We passed the intersection with the Clintonia Trail, where we did in fact see some red clintonia, and turned downhill to begin our descent toward the ocean. This took us into the Squashan Creek canyon, whose steep sides and dense forest darkened the trail. Fallen trees hundreds of feet long, their trunks thicker than a man is tall, lay shattered and rotting on the mountainsides, slowly sinking into a sea of ferns. We had to use hands and feet to climb over them.
I felt as if I were walking backwards in time through a forest primeval. How long ago had these trees fallen? Months? Years? Decades? Centuries? And why? From a landslide, old age, the winds of a storm? Their life events occur on a timescale entirely unlike my own. A sapling might wait for centuries in the shade before one of its elders falls to leave a gap of light where it can grow. The length of time between their generations can be greater than the age of the United States.
We dropped lower as we neared Squashan Creek’s outlet to the Pacific Ocean. Thick bushes of thimbleberry and salmonberry, over 6 feet tall, lined the trail. There were also coltsfoot and cow parsnip, weedy-looking plants with huge leaves. We crossed a small feeder stream choked with horsetails and ferns and lined with yellow monkey flowers. Down here there were no longer many redwoods. Instead, the salty ocean air that blows through the canyon favored Sitka spruce. We could feel a breeze coming off the ocean as we walked: the same air that gave an advantage to the spruce. And as we got closer, we could also hear the surf.
There was no dramatic view of the ocean as we left the forest. Instead, we were greeted by a broad seaside meadow populated with scattered spruce, most of them barely 10 feet tall. The wind and salt spray near the ocean were just too harsh for them to grow any higher. Behind us, as further evidence of this, half the spruces near the exit from the canyon were lying on the ground, their tops pointing inland, probably flattened by blasts from a winter storm.
We followed Davidson Road to the Fern Canyon parking area and then walked through the meadow to have lunch on the shore. Behind us were the beach’s namesake gold bluffs, their tops covered in dark spruces. A herd of elk trotted away to the north as we walked by them. The ground was marshy and we tried to keep our feet dry with little success. Sand flies landed on our hands and faces, but a pleasant on-shore breeze kept most of them away.
Once at the beach, we sat on the warm, dark sand and ate lunch, watching black cormorants and flocks of pelicans fly over the surf.
After lunch we returned to the forest through Fern Canyon, a 20-foot wide gravel stream bed bounded by 40-foot cliffs. These cliffs have combined with the constant flow of moist air coming from the ocean to create a perfect habitat for ferns. Out of the dark muddy cliffs grew five-fingered and sword ferns along with deer, lady, bracken, and chain ferns, their fronds rocking slowly in the breeze.
Rivulets of water trickled down the cliffs over mossy rocks and into the pebble banks of Fern Creek. It was a slow, meandering creek and we crossed it several times, often on logs that had fallen into the canyon from the forest above.
The sky was beginning to clear and sunlight made its way through the trees, bouncing off the cliffs and illuminating the ferns. We made our way through the canyon like this, walking on gravel and balancing on polished logs to cross the stream, for twenty minutes before we turned uphill and back into the forest on the James Irvine Trail.
As we hiked out of the canyon, we entered an old-growth Sitka spruce forest where the maroon spruce trunks grew from a thick green understory. The tree trunks had old branch stubs sticking straight out from them like broken bicycle spokes, moss hanging from their tips. The Sitka spruce didn’t quite have the girth of the redwoods, but they could hold their own when it came to height: a few of the park’s Sitka spruce are over 300 feet tall. One Sitka spruce grew from the side of a fallen redwood, its roots wrapping around the trunk of the fallen tree like constricting snake.
By now the sun was coming out, changing the forest’s character as we walked back on the James Irvine Trail. Scenery that had been cool and gloomy in the morning had become warm and inviting.
As we walked back, I watched the forest gradually return to the redwood and Douglas-fir mix from the morning.
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What a great trail description — love the photos of the elk drinking the water while standing in it! Gorgeous forest.