Redwood Trees. Butano Redwoods State Park, California. June 1, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Closely spaced coast redwood trees at Butano State Park
Going to this spot was a special and unusual pleasure. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area almost all of my life (save my first four years in Minnesota) I know may way around much of the local outdoor scene quite well. From the time I was a small child my family spent weekends visiting the many area parks, often picnicking and then hiking extensively. Yet somehow I had never visited Butano Redwoods State Park, tucked into the coastal mountains between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, and a very quite alternative to some of the more popular and busy redwood parks.
I’m not yet any sort of expert on this park, but the central feature appears to be an intimate little creek flowing down a small and quiet valley. It looks to me like the area must have been logged many years ago, as there are old stumps of huge long-gone trees, and most of the living trees are relatively slender. But they are big enough to give the feeling of the redwood forest, and even in this dry year the place is lush and full of vegetation. And during my short walk to photograph in this watershed I saw only a handful of other people. I spotted this tightly spaced group of trees across the canyon and positioned myself so that I could photograph a wall of redwood trunks with a few slender trunks breaking up the larger patterns. A few moments later the thing fog overhead began to clear and the bright shafts of light made the forest beautiful… but almost impossible to photograph!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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