• 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.

• 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.

We were on a long-weekend trip with the San Francisco Sierra Club. Our group left for our hike an hour after sunrise, driving east into the mountains through tall, thick forests. The clouds began to break up, revealing blue skies above as the road climbed into the mountains.

We stopped at the Doe Flat trailhead, at just over 4,000 feet, from where we could see endless green mountains to the north and the fog in their valleys beginning to burn off as the day warmed.

• Start/End: Doe Flat trailhead, 41.8142, -123.7079
• Route: Doe Flat Trail, Buck Lake Trail, Devil’s Punchbowl Trail
• Distance: about 13 miles
• Elevation gain: 2,000 feet
• Highlights: alpine lakes, old-growth forests, good views

We left our cars and walked out into the forest. The trees were tall but separated enough enough to let sunlight through to the forest floor. They were all of various sizes and ages, some of them standing dead and others rotting on the ground. This, along with the absence of stumps from logging told me that we were in an old-growth forest.

The forest floor was covered with pine needles, vanilla leaf, and Oregon grape and the ground was already starting to get dusty even this early in the summer. Most of the trees were Douglas-fir but I also spotted some incense cedar and sugar pine. There were many other species, I’m sure, considering that these mountains harbor some of the most diverse coniferous forests in the world, but I couldn’t identify them.

The bark of the Douglas-firs was covered in a rich patina of light green witch’s hair lichen. A few species of wildflower added joy to the forest floor, including little yellow violets, white and pink trilliums, and the lovely and mysterious calypso orchids. Sticky currant and the Oregon grape were also in bloom.

We stopped for a quick break at Buck Lake, a deep blue-green lake surrounded by tall conifers. It was still early in the morning and our large group surprised a group of campers who had spent the night there.

We listened to the ‘wenk wenk wenk’ of red-breasted nuthatches as they searched tree trunks for bugs to eat and the distinctive ‘quick, three beers’ song of olive-sided flycatchers before getting back on the trail. I saw some Nuttall’s toothwort on a sunny patch and we all enjoyed the low, rhythmic whumping of a drumming grouse. We crossed a few streams and some of them were swollen from melting snow and required careful footwork.

I took a closer look that the bushes I’d seen almost constantly from the trail and realized they were in fact trees. They were tanoaks, but they are afflicted by sudden oak death here, and the disease seemed to be keeping them short by killing them before they grew taller, in effect turning them into bushes.

The hike’s character changed completely once we started the Devil’s Punchbowl Trail. We’d been walking for miles on a gentle hillside traverse, slowly rising and falling through nearly continuous forest. But now the trail went aggressively uphill, gaining some 800 feet in less than half a mile. Even peak-bagger Bob Burd had this to say about it on his way to Bear Mountain via Devil’s Punchbowl:

When I reached the next junction I turned right and started up the very steep switchbacks leading to a ridge. They were incredibly steep actually, and I was glad to find some worthy switchbacks that tested ones mettle rather than the lazy packmule ones found elsewhere in the state. These were manly switchbacks, by God!

Elizabeth and I got hot as the forest grew thinner and the trail grew sunnier. But we were well within the Siskiyou Wilderness now, and the elevation gain let us see a pristine landscape dominated by the long, forested canyon of Clear Creek extending for miles to our north and the mountains rising on both sides of it.

Mountain dogwood bloomed along the trail, its big white flowers contrasting nicely with the orange bark of incense cedar. We also saw some Brewer spruce, one of the world’s rarest spruce species, with its needles growing from distinctive weeping branches.

In front of us was Bear Mountain, a black hulk whose gullies were still streaked with winter snow. Once we crossed the stream that drained the Punchbowl we were near timberline and could enjoy the cool breeze blowing off the mountain. The patches of dirt between the rocks were filled with yellow glacier lilies and mats of spreading phlox with little violet five-petaled flowers.

Ahead of us was a deep-green tarn surrounded by cliffs and framed by Bear Mountain. We walked to its shore and sat down, taking off our shoes and even putting our feet in the bracing water. We got out our lunches just as Brad, on of the trip leaders, informed us that we weren’t at the Devil’s Punchbowl yet. In fact, this was a nameless tarn below our real destination and we still had some way to go.

So we continued around the east side of the tarn, carefully walked across some steep mud on the north side where the trail had washed out, and then continued toward the true Punchbowl over a mix of consolidated snow and boulders by following the plentiful cairns.

We knew we were at the right spot when we reached a much larger alpine lake directly below Bear Mountain, surrounded by a dramatic cirque whose couloirs were still filled with snow. A few conifers grew out of the rocks around the lake and the snow in the couloirs was slowly melting into the water, forming little bergschrunds just above where it was falling in. Patches of ice floated over most of the lake, masking its blue-green waters with shades of gray. Devil’s Punchbowl lies around 4,800 feet and Bear Mountain tops out at 6,411 feet, but the scenery we enjoyed made us feel as if we were at 10,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada.

After lunch we returned the way we had come up. The walk back was uneventful, a warm afternoon stroll through the woods.