Day 16: The Redwoods

The penultimate day of our journey was more chaotic than we expected. Our use of the words “cursed,” “janky,” and “unhinged” had been high from the beginning but today, it shot through the roof.

The greatest contributor to the trip’s “jankiness” were my shoes, which had failed to dry in Oregon’s humid air. During Kelly’s first driving shift, I alternately held up each shoe against the car’s vents and cranked up the air conditioning. Once we had reached the scenic and slower drives in California’s redwoods, I switched to simply holding one shoe out of the window at a time. This treatment helped much more than the previous use of a hairdryer, which seems to have damaged some of the fabric on my already worn shoes.

This entire episode, however, did not turn out to be completely pointless. As I sat in the car resting both shoes against the vents while waiting for Kelly to buy her morning coffee, I noticed a significant difference in their wear. While the soles of the left shoe were worn down in the front, the soles of the right shoe were worn down in the back. I realised that this must have been caused by an injury I sustained while hiking in the spring. Thus, this silly mishap combined with Kelly’s equally silly coffee addiction might have produced a profound effect: I will be working on fixing the way I walk.

Crossing into California was like entering a whole new country. Our car was funnelled through what appeared to be a customs booth, and for the first time, signage warned us that speed limits would be enforced by radars. The next day, we would also realise that we had once and for all entered the land of expensive gas. While we saw gas as cheap as 3.5 dollars a gallon in Kansas, some of the gas we would drive past in San Francisco went for double that price. Having only a very vague idea of how much a gallon is, I did some calculations on the back of a receipt only to find that even the highest price was comparable to average prices in Europe.

We drove to the seventh and last UNESCO site we would see on this road trip: the Redwood National and State Parks. We stopped by three: Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, and Humboldt Redwoods State Park. We spent most time walking around the first, as the path towards the trailhead of Stout Grove was somewhat rocky, and Kelly did not want to try her luck after our experiences in Montana. My favourite part, though, was simply driving along the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway in Prairie Creek and Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt. Sometimes, the sunlight filtered through the trees, while at other times, its rays descended through a curtain of silvery mist.

As we left the park, we encountered a stark reminder of the fragility of it all. The visibility worsened and up ahead, we could see the wisps of grey clouds. Driving closer, we saw a small plane circling over a cover of smoke, and finally came upon a row of fire trucks holding up the cars going in the opposite direction. It was a forest fire. I remembered the words of a ranger in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, who told us that redwoods are effectively fire resistant, but they were of little consolation when I thought about all the other forests at risk.

That night, we ate dinner and found lodging in Ukiah. Our drive was 312 miles, bringing our total mileage to 5668.