Ridges and Redwoods. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Old-growth and second-growth redwood forests on successive ridges
The drive from my location in the San Francisco Bay Area to the Redwood National and State Parks is a long one. One can either take the slower, shorter, and arguably more scenic route up US 101 or the faster, longer, and less visually interesting way up Interstate 5. On this visit, my first serious foray into these parks, I went up 5 to Redding, then headed west for another 3 hours to reach the coast, and finally turned north towards the actual Redwood National Park.
I have previously mentioned that I usually don’t exactly over-plan when I visit a new location, preferring to give myself a chance to discover things on my own terms. (To be honest, I’ve been accuses — accurately — of under-planning!) By the time I arrived it was too late to do a lot of scouting, so I headed up into the park to a well-known grove, made a brief stop there, and then continued on up a tiny, twisting road. Eventually I arrived at a large hilltop clearing, probably the unfortunate left-over of decades-earlier clear-cutting but today offering an expansive view across valley and hills in the very late afternoon light. Just below me was a ridge topped by second-growth trees, in the middle distance was a less-accessible ridge with huge old-growth trees, and on the far side of the valley the effects of that old clear-cutting is still visible.
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G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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So what are your thoughts about the grand redwoods in the Redwood National & State Parks vs the ones at Muir Woods? I been to both places and liked both places, but for me the full sized trees up north were much more impressive. On the other hand, I liked the peaceful, quiet, sometimes foggy, Muir Woods. Also just curious, did you try to get an impressive photo of a whole redwood tree? I’d think it would be difficult to do.
My thoughts are, it seems, pretty much the same as yours, Ernie. Muir Woods (if you go very early on a weekday, especially in winter, when it isn’t overrun by visitors from nearby San Francisco) has a nice intimate quality that I like, but it doesn’t have the same primeval quality that I feel in the North Coast Redwoods. Up there, as you know, the trees a huge, there are vast numbers of them, and they go on and on.
I did not try for a photograph of a whole tree. That would require a fairly special situation, namely a very big tree next to a forest opening likely created by clear-cutting! Another option is to find a trail through the forest that rises above the bottom of a canyon where large trees are located, allowing a photograph from part way up the tree’s trunk. (I have made photographs somewhat like that at Muir Woods.)
Some years ago I decided that the best way to “show” the size of these immense trees may be to not show the whole thing, but instead to imply the height. I actually make most redwood photographs in landscape orientation, focusing on a section of the lower portion of the tree’s immense base. In a sense I think that this suggest that the trees are so large that then cannot be contained within the frame, and the height of the unseen portion of the tree is suggested by its absence.
Dan